Printers - PageCounters are incorrect

Hello,

PRTG only queries the OID and displays the result. Therefore this needs to be an issue related to the Printer or the OID. Which Printer model and OID are you using? If you are using Canon, this article might be helpful. I can imagine that for example the Web-UI is displaying only black pages while the OID you are using is displaying colored pages as well?

@Timo Dambach:

We have mainly HP and Toshiba printers (with some exceptions to CAB, Zebra and Dymo). Both manufacturers have the same issue.

Both the OID and the Web-UI Number display total pages. No matter if it was black/white, colored, printed, copied or faxed. If I print 2 pages, both numbers increase equally by 2. We had the thought that maybe the "Doublesided Print" made some issues, but that is also counted equally on both values.

Another thing we considered was, that maybe "Service-Prints" by consultants or support-engineers aren't added to the web-ui. Made sense, when the printer was off by a few 10s or 100s of pages, but we have a printer with a difference of 6000 pages.

FloMit, that's kind of an issue with the manufactures.

Not every printer uses the same OID to show page counts.

Have a look at this link: https://www.it-admins.com/it-assets-database/online-manual/printers/

Did not yet have the time to develop a custom sensor to cover the relative page count per day in PRTG - what is actually what I as a IT manager really would need - to determine if a printer is justified at a certain location, but that's a whole different story.

Hope the list helps you - it includes some Zebra printers.

Regards

Florian Rossmark

www.it-admins.com

Thank you for answering, Florian. :)

@FloMit You can also use our SNMP Tester to check the results of different OID's.

Kind Regards,
Timo Dambach
Paessler Tech Support

Possibly not directly related to this topic, but I wrote a little script for PRTG in PowerShell that does some basic page count relative to the current date. It's just a first draft, but it might help to shed some better light in how the printer is actually utilized then only using the standard PRTG graph for the current total page count.

Script as always can be found here - I might update it over time.

https://www.it-admins.com/monitoring-relative-printer-page-counts-with-prtg/

Currently it's just a sub-set of what I do in another project of mine, but may be PRTG one day will adapt the idea and integrate a default sensor for this instead.

As always, I hope it helps some of you.

Regards

Florian Rossmark

www.it-admins.com