Any OpenSource Print Monitoring Solutions
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@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.
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@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.
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Pause the print monitoring convo for a moment, it will be forked to a new thread.
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And... go.
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@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.
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@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.
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@travisdh1 We have a uniflow print server but nothing monitoring local printers
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@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?
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@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.
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@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.
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What is the purpose of the monitoring? What business goal will it serve?
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@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.
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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.
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Would it be easier to just figure out who keeps ordering paper and ink? More useful than monitoring how many pages are printed.
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@scottalanmiller This is a company that couldn't locate a record of purchasing our VM host machine.
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Moved topic from Water Closet to IT Discussion. Seems it really should be there.
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@gjacobse said in Any OpenSource Print Monitoring Solutions:
Moved topic from Water Closet to IT Discussion. Seems it really should be there.
Good idea.
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@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
