Printer monitoring app

Python app built to monitor statistics from network printers and send emails to report them

• It utilizes a three-level classification system consisting of WARNING, CRITICAL and ERROR categories
• Implements parallel execution when connecting to devices
• Implements parallel execution when sending emails
• Supported printer brand at the moment: Brother

Software used

• Python v3.11.1

Tested on

1. • Brand: Brother Industries, Ltd
   • Model: HL-1210W series

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2. • Brand: Brother Industries, Ltd
   • Model: DCP-1610NW series

Considerations

1. About the full URI

   You need to manually find out the full URI of the CSV resource for each printer in your network and then add it to the devices.json file as a new dictionary in the list, separating it in keys: values pairs

   • In this case, the full URI for the tested printers were: http://192.168.1.5:80/etc/mnt_info.csv and http://192.168.120.17:80/etc/mnt_info.csv

   Tips:

   1. Inspecting web

      You can use the "Inspect" option when right-clicking on the button available in the web browser printer GUI when trying to download a CSV file (More useful and quicker tip)

      Steps:

      a) Go to the Network tab and now left-click the button.

      b) Close the window that just opened

      c) Under the Name column, click in the csv file and go to the Headers tab

      d) You will find the full URI in the Request URL field

   or

   2. Using a sniffer tool

      You can use a sniffer tool like Wireshark to inspect packets and find the full URI (Traffic could be encrypted in this situation)

Starting

Step 1/3: Clone the repo, create/activate a virtual environment and install dependencies

a) Clone repository into your machine

git clone https://github.com/mvarrone/printer-monitoring.git && cd printer-monitoring

b) Create a virtual environment and install dependencies

On Windows

1.Creating a virtual environment

python -m venv venv

2.Activating it

a) Using CMD

.\venv\Scripts\activate.bat

b) Using PowerShell

.\venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1

3.Installing dependencies

pip install -r requirements.txt

4.(OPTIONAL) Deactivating the virtual environment

deactivate

On Linux/Mac

1. Creating a virtual environment

python3 -m venv venv

2.Activating it

source venv/bin/activate

3.Installing dependencies

pip install -r requirements.txt

4.(OPTIONAL) Deactivating the virtual environment

deactivate

Step 2/3: Some changes before running

1. This project was tested using a Gmail account so you need to create an application password inside Google Account settings

   a) Go to Google Account

   b) Security tab

   c) How to access to Google > 2-step verification

   d) App passwords

• Once there, create an entry like this:

  a) Select app: Other. Name it whatever you want, for example, Python script

  b) Click on the Generate button

  c) Copy the 16 characters in length code that was generated

  d) Paste it in the app_password value in the config.json

2. Modify sender_email and receiver_email values in config.json

3. Modify devices.json in order to add your network printer devices

   Example:

   [
       {
           "protocol": "http",
           "ip_address": "192.168.1.5",
           "port": 80,
           "path": "etc",
           "csv_filename": "mnt_info.csv",
           "brand": "brother"
       }
   ]

Step 3/3: Run the script

On Windows

cd app && python .\main.py 

On Linux/Mac

cd app && python3 .\main.py 

Example provided

A Python 3 script and a CSV file were provided. See example Also, a results.json was recently provided

• The intention of providing an example is for you to know how the data was originally downloaded from the printer device and how is processed in the Python file

• I found it might be useful for cases where:

  • there is no printer available in your network
  • the printer exports some other format file
  • the printer does not provide a way to export data and you want to test it anyway
  • the CSV file has not the same structure

Contributing

Contributions to this project are welcome. If you find any issues or have suggestions for improvement, feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the file for details