OS Printer Monitoring
- Danica Esteban
- Dinesh Amatya
Background
Monitoring printers provides real-time visibility into printer status, errors, and alerts. It allows you to manage printing workloads and identify issues like paper jams and connectivity problems. Proactive monitoring helps minimize printer downtime and reduce IT support's burden.
How to Configure OS Printer for Monitoring
From IT-Conductor Service Grid, click ▶ to expand “Linux Systems”.
Figure 1: Linux Systems in IT-Conductor Service GridClick the object menu of the Linux system to be configured and then click Retrievers.
Figure 2: Navigate to Retrievers OptionClick the object menu of retriever “Printers (lpstat -p)“ and then click Activate.
The connected printers will be added to IT-Conductor for monitoring.
Monitoring Features
Printer Statistics
IT-Conductor pulls printer statistics like status, request age, and request count.
View status, request age, and/or request/job count in more detail by clicking on the metric name. Adjust the chart depending on your preferred timescale.
Note: Printer status could be “Idle”, “Printing”, or “Disabled”.
Alerting Features
IT-Conductor generates alerts based on the values of collected stats.
In Figure 4, the warning alert is generated if the average request count is more than 1 in the last 15 minutes and the alert is resent if after 15 minutes there are still jobs running.
Similarly, in Figure 5, the critical alarm alert is generated if the job has been running for more than 60 minutes (3600 seconds) and the alert is resent if after 60 minutes there are still jobs running.
See Configuring IT-Conductor Alerts for further instructions.