ML
    • Recent
    • Categories
    • Tags
    • Popular
    • Users
    • Groups
    • Register
    • Login

    Any OpenSource Print Monitoring Solutions

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved IT Discussion
    28 Posts 8 Posters 1.8k Views
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as topic
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with topic management privileges can see it.
    • wirestyle22W
      wirestyle22 @StrongBad
      last edited by

      @StrongBad said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

      @wirestyle22 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

      @DustinB3403 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

      @wirestyle22 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

      Has anyone created a nice open source print monitoring solution in linux?

      What kind of monitoring are you looking for?

      I want to be able to monitor everything in an invisible client (prints, copies, etc) and generate a report in a central location. Nothing crazy.

      Are you just using CUPS? I'm sure CUPS will provide that information somehow, have never tried but it's pretty robust.

      No but I wanted to start a dialogue about possible solutions. I need to monitor everything including local printers.

      StrongBadS 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • StrongBadS
        StrongBad @wirestyle22
        last edited by

        @wirestyle22 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

        @StrongBad said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

        @wirestyle22 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

        @DustinB3403 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

        @wirestyle22 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

        Has anyone created a nice open source print monitoring solution in linux?

        What kind of monitoring are you looking for?

        I want to be able to monitor everything in an invisible client (prints, copies, etc) and generate a report in a central location. Nothing crazy.

        Are you just using CUPS? I'm sure CUPS will provide that information somehow, have never tried but it's pretty robust.

        No but I wanted to start a dialogue about possible solutions. I need to monitor everything including local printers.

        Local printers would be different than print servers. I doubt there is an open source option for local printers, pretty limited scope there. But there might be. If you were using CUPS locally, it would be the same as on a server. But I'm going to guess that even though you are looking for open source, you are not doing open source printing?

        travisdh1T 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
        • travisdh1T
          travisdh1 @StrongBad
          last edited by

          @StrongBad said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

          @wirestyle22 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

          @StrongBad said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

          @wirestyle22 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

          @DustinB3403 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

          @wirestyle22 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

          Has anyone created a nice open source print monitoring solution in linux?

          What kind of monitoring are you looking for?

          I want to be able to monitor everything in an invisible client (prints, copies, etc) and generate a report in a central location. Nothing crazy.

          Are you just using CUPS? I'm sure CUPS will provide that information somehow, have never tried but it's pretty robust.

          No but I wanted to start a dialogue about possible solutions. I need to monitor everything including local printers.

          Local printers would be different than print servers. I doubt there is an open source option for local printers, pretty limited scope there. But there might be. If you were using CUPS locally, it would be the same as on a server. But I'm going to guess that even though you are looking for open source, you are not doing open source printing?

          Yeah, CUPS is just easy and logs to the normal logging location in most Linux Distributions. I don't think I'd even consider it on Windows tho.

          StrongBadS 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
          • StrongBadS
            StrongBad @travisdh1
            last edited by

            @travisdh1 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

            @StrongBad said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

            @wirestyle22 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

            @StrongBad said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

            @wirestyle22 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

            @DustinB3403 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

            @wirestyle22 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

            Has anyone created a nice open source print monitoring solution in linux?

            What kind of monitoring are you looking for?

            I want to be able to monitor everything in an invisible client (prints, copies, etc) and generate a report in a central location. Nothing crazy.

            Are you just using CUPS? I'm sure CUPS will provide that information somehow, have never tried but it's pretty robust.

            No but I wanted to start a dialogue about possible solutions. I need to monitor everything including local printers.

            Local printers would be different than print servers. I doubt there is an open source option for local printers, pretty limited scope there. But there might be. If you were using CUPS locally, it would be the same as on a server. But I'm going to guess that even though you are looking for open source, you are not doing open source printing?

            Yeah, CUPS is just easy and logs to the normal logging location in most Linux Distributions. I don't think I'd even consider it on Windows tho.

            When he said open source, I was hoping he was using open source for the printing, too. Only requires that the print servers be CUPS, not the end clients. But if the printing is local without print servers, that won't work.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • scottalanmillerS
              scottalanmiller
              last edited by

              Pause the print monitoring convo for a moment, it will be forked to a new thread.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • scottalanmillerS
                scottalanmiller
                last edited by

                And... go.

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • coliverC
                  coliver @wirestyle22
                  last edited by

                  @wirestyle22 said in Any OpenSource Print Monitoring Solutions:

                  @coliver said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

                  @wirestyle22 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

                  @DustinB3403 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

                  @wirestyle22 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

                  Has anyone created a nice open source print monitoring solution in linux?

                  What kind of monitoring are you looking for?

                  I want to be able to monitor everything in an invisible client (prints, copies, etc) and generate a report in a central location. Nothing crazy.

                  I don't know about opensource but I think Papercut has a free tool that will work on Linux for this.

                  Yeah I'm familiar with it. Used it at my last job. You can see everything on the local PC but can't generate reports in a central location from what I saw. Correct me if I'm wrong

                  You can export the reports to a share. I believe there is even a way to automate the export.

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • travisdh1T
                    travisdh1 @wirestyle22
                    last edited by

                    @wirestyle22 Do you have any sort of network monitor already setup? I imagine you could use the same monitor for printing, at least outside of the Spiceworks one.

                    wirestyle22W 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • wirestyle22W
                      wirestyle22 @travisdh1
                      last edited by

                      @travisdh1 We have a uniflow print server but nothing monitoring local printers

                      scottalanmillerS 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • scottalanmillerS
                        scottalanmiller @wirestyle22
                        last edited by

                        @wirestyle22 said in Any OpenSource Print Monitoring Solutions:

                        @travisdh1 We have a uniflow print server but nothing monitoring local printers

                        Do the local printers get printed to through the server?

                        wirestyle22W 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                        • wirestyle22W
                          wirestyle22 @scottalanmiller
                          last edited by

                          @scottalanmiller said in Any OpenSource Print Monitoring Solutions:

                          @wirestyle22 said in Any OpenSource Print Monitoring Solutions:

                          @travisdh1 We have a uniflow print server but nothing monitoring local printers

                          Do the local printers get printed to through the server?

                          Not currently. Uniflow costs money though so I wanted to find a free open source solution I could create and manage.

                          scottalanmillerS 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                          • scottalanmillerS
                            scottalanmiller @wirestyle22
                            last edited by

                            @wirestyle22 said in Any OpenSource Print Monitoring Solutions:

                            @scottalanmiller said in Any OpenSource Print Monitoring Solutions:

                            @wirestyle22 said in Any OpenSource Print Monitoring Solutions:

                            @travisdh1 We have a uniflow print server but nothing monitoring local printers

                            Do the local printers get printed to through the server?

                            Not currently. Uniflow costs money though so I wanted to find a free open source solution I could create and manage.

                            Print servers are free, print monitoring without a print server is expensive. I'd say the cart is before the horse... fix the architecture and then monitor it rather than monitoring and then looking for a solution that that might not monitor. Not that centralized printing is always the answer, but if you are in a position of wanting to always monitor, it probably is.

                            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                            • scottalanmillerS
                              scottalanmiller
                              last edited by

                              What is the purpose of the monitoring? What business goal will it serve?

                              DustinB3403D 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                              • DustinB3403D
                                DustinB3403 @scottalanmiller
                                last edited by

                                @scottalanmiller said in Any OpenSource Print Monitoring Solutions:

                                What is the purpose of the monitoring? What business goal will it serve?

                                Probably to try and determine how much printing is costing the company, and who the worst offenders are. I was looking at this very same thing, and started using Zabbix, completely forgetting about printing since the system stats were more useful.

                                Zabbix probably can do this, I'll have to look into it again.

                                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                • RamblingBipedR
                                  RamblingBiped
                                  last edited by

                                  BASH scripts and SNMP is about as basic as you can get... I use Nagios for monitoring my network printers. It warns me of prolonged paper jams, toner, and any other errors.

                                  Not that I care though.

                                  Because, you know, they're printers and they are inherently evil; put on this earth to spread discord and foster feelings of hate and distrust.

                                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
                                  • scottalanmillerS
                                    scottalanmiller
                                    last edited by

                                    Would it be easier to just figure out who keeps ordering paper and ink? More useful than monitoring how many pages are printed.

                                    wirestyle22W 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                    • wirestyle22W
                                      wirestyle22 @scottalanmiller
                                      last edited by

                                      @scottalanmiller This is a company that couldn't locate a record of purchasing our VM host machine.

                                      scottalanmillerS 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                      • gjacobseG
                                        gjacobse
                                        last edited by

                                        Moved topic from Water Closet to IT Discussion. Seems it really should be there.

                                        scottalanmillerS 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                                        • scottalanmillerS
                                          scottalanmiller @gjacobse
                                          last edited by

                                          @gjacobse said in Any OpenSource Print Monitoring Solutions:

                                          Moved topic from Water Closet to IT Discussion. Seems it really should be there.

                                          Good idea.

                                          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                          • scottalanmillerS
                                            scottalanmiller @wirestyle22
                                            last edited by

                                            @wirestyle22 said in Any OpenSource Print Monitoring Solutions:

                                            @scottalanmiller This is a company that couldn't locate a record of purchasing our VM host machine.

                                            Maybe print monitoring is a bit over the top for them then 🙂

                                            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                                            • 1
                                            • 2
                                            • 1 / 2
                                            • First post
                                              Last post