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The other week I finally for this thing working I've been trying weakly to do every now and then when I had a few minutes free: send an alert before a toner runs out in a printer!

Way back I set up SNMP_exporter to fetch metrics from switches. This worked very nicely. ( In retrospect this works nicely because it's the default type of device )

But for printers we didn't get much useful data out. Even though we use the vanilla upstream snmp.yml which has printer stuff in it. And when I did an snmpwalk I did manage with some research to find the correct OIDs to query to get the level of ink in the toners. So I knew the printer did publish the information I was looking for.

The answer? Select a module when sending the request to the exporter! I didn't select printer_mib so it used if_mib that only has interface statistics.

What would have helped? Not suing the vanilla (large) snmp.yml and only use a custom one that has the data we wanted..

Printers are no fun :/

Prometheus is!