Ask any IT or MSP team how they read printer counters and you’ll usually hear “SNMP” — and for the majority of the fleet, that’s the right answer. But almost every real-world fleet has a few devices that don’t fit the pattern, and those are exactly the ones that cause billing gaps if they’re ignored.

SNMP covers most of the fleet

Simple Network Management Protocol is built into virtually every business printer and MFP shipped in the last two decades. Once a device is discovered on the network, it will happily report page counts, toner levels, and status without any manual intervention. This is why network discovery is the default, first-choice method: it’s automatic, it’s low-touch, and it scales to hundreds of devices without extra hardware.

Where SNMP falls short

A handful of situations break the “just use SNMP” assumption:

Devices not on the network. Small offices, kiosks, or older printers connected directly to a single PC via USB never get an IP address, so there’s nothing for SNMP to query.
Network segmentation. Printers placed on an isolated VLAN for security reasons may be unreachable from a monitoring agent even though they’re technically networked.
Legacy hardware. Some older or consumer-grade devices implement SNMP poorly or not at all.

If your process stops at “scan the network,” these devices simply don’t get read — and on invoice day, that shows up as usage nobody billed for.

Why this matters for billing, not just monitoring: a device you can't see is a device you can't invoice. For MSPs specifically, an unread printer isn't just a monitoring gap — it's lost revenue every single month it goes unnoticed.

The fix: cover the gap with USB

For devices that can’t be reached over the network, Printventury’s lightweight agent can also read counters directly over USB. The workflow looks the same to your team — the device shows up in the same fleet list, with the same history and the same reporting — the only difference is how the number got there. You don’t have to choose between “automate everything” and “manually track the exceptions.” Both paths feed the same dashboard.

A simple way to check your own coverage

Walk your device list and ask, for each one: does this show up in our monitoring today, and if not, why not? Devices that fail that check are usually the USB-only ones — small printers in reception areas, dedicated label printers, or older units kept around for a specific task. They’re easy to overlook precisely because they’re low-volume, but low-volume doesn’t mean zero-revenue.

See how device discovery works in Printventury, including how the agent handles both SNMP and USB-connected devices without extra configuration per site.