So I have this friend from the Great White North who wanted to only capture printers in their environment. She had attempted to set up a behavior that used an SNMP/DNS functionality (since of course we gather printer metrics from SNMP). Well the problem was that the range being discovered also contained other SNMP enabled devices that wasn't helpful to her inventory.
The secret lied in the port probes and creating a proper functionality in a behaviour...
Being that we already check for standard printer ports (515/9100) for our credentialess discovery we have a unique way to trigger classifiers when we find ports open. By default when we check the printer ports we don't trigger any additional queries because by default we rely on SNMP to respond and classify accordingly. So we went into the port probe module and simply added 'SNMP Classify' to the triggers probe column for the printer.
This way when we capture these ports/services being available we will then trigger the SNMP query that would pull back the necessary information. Now we had to update the behaviors functionality so that when we scanned the network we ONLY looked for the printer ports...
So we called the printer only behavior in the schedule, kicked off the discovery and found only those printers she was looking for while passing over the other network enabled devices that we're not part of the scope.. Success!
I wanted to post this to get our Discovery community to think beyond out of our default box and to help all realize that discovery is near only limited by your imagination, the rest is just a few clicks away...
Dale, This is what it would have looked like... Add the SNMP Classifier and change the CIs Value to true, then create a printer only behavior applied to your schedule and you should be right. I apologize, don't have a printer that I can test against to make sure this functionality hasn't changed in 6 years so let us know how this goes..
