How can I set up Nagios to Monitor a Canon iR 3035?

Question

I've been googling for how to set up printer monitoring - especially for Canon printers. This is because I have a Canon iR 3035 that I want to monitor for toner problems, paper jams, and paper outages. I found a few references to config settings like this with google searching:

define command{
 command_name       check_hpjd
 command_line       $USER1$/check_hpjd -H $HOSTADDRESS$ $ARG1$
}

However there seems to be no definitive documentation - at least none that I can find. Where should I be looking and how can I learn about setting up printer monitoring with Nagios - especially for the Canon ImageRunner series?

Answer 1

Canon ImageRunner printers support SNMP(v1, "public" community by default) to query their status. They report through the standard printers MIB (.1.3.6.1.43, available here) as well as a proprietary Canon MIB (available through Canon, with a developer membership).

You can also implement screen-scraping from the web interface, but SNMP would be easier (and less likely to change if you change printers in the future).

Answer 2

For the type of information you're looking for, I'm guessing that you'll need to use some custom SNMP checks. Nagios ships with the check_snmp plugin - you'll just need to look up the Canon MIBs to see which OIDs you'll need to query for jams, toner levels, etc.