Printer monitoring

[mario.rimann]

Hi

We're starting to monitor our printer's toner levels and page counters. So far everything works fine.

But of course, the printers are switched off during night, which couses gaps in the graphs as shown in the screenshot.

Is there a solution, to draw the lines during the gap time, expecting the levels to stay the same during "off-time"? Or to draw the missing part of the graph as soon as the next valid value is recieved?

Cheers,
Mario

[gandalf]

There is no "valid" way to do this. You may of course introduce a script of your own, that prints the last values even if the target does not respond.
R

[cactusmani3c]

many printers can actually email you when they're low on ink, etc anyway!

[TheWitness]

Actually, the solution is to modify the heartbeat in your Data Templates to say upto 1 day ~86400. That way you won't get any gaps if the printer is down less than 1 day. You can increase this value as well.

Now, for existing RRDfiles, you will need to "tune" them to adjust the heartbeat.

QED.

TheWitness

[Mika2008]

hillo i m interresting

[mario.rimann]

I stumbled upon that heartbeat-change mentioned above while searching for something else and yes, it works!

But as said, existing *.rrd files must be changed (tuned). I did it with the following command:

Code: Select all

rrdtool tune /var/www/cacti/rra/RRDFILENAME.rrd --heartbeat DATASOURCENAME:86400

Replace the two uppercase placeholders with the filename and the data source name and it run the command from shell.

I found it on the debugging-checklist at http://docs.cacti.net/manual:087:4_help.2_debugging where it states:

For standard 300 seconds polling intervals (step=300), it is wise to set minimal_heartbeat to 600 seconds. If a single update is missing and the next one occurs in less than 600 seconds from the last one, rrdtool will interpolate the missing update. Thus, gaps are “filled” automatically by interpolation. Be aware of the fact, that this is no “real” data! Again, this must be done in the Data Template itself and by using rrdtool tune for all existing rrd files of this type.

Thanks for all replies!

[gandalf]

The bad thing is, that you won't see errors in data gathering or if sth happens to your device unless the heartbeat has passed.
You will not be able to distinguish between "working" and "not working".
That's why I said that there is no "valid" way.
R

[mario.rimann]

You will not be able to distinguish between "working" and "not working".

I fully agree. For all other stuff, I wouldn't agree this as a solution - but for monitoring toner levels in our printers it's totally ok.

- mario