Central Reports
Organizations with multiple sites typically follow one of two deployment strategies: centralized or decentralized. This includes businesses with offices in multiple cities and education institutes with international campuses. Each model comes with its own pros and cons.
One advantage of the decentralized model is that a SysAdmin at one site can't inadvertently make changes that affect the other sites. Poor inter-site link reliability and simplified site administration are other motivators for adopting the decentralized model. The main disadvantage of decentralization is the difficulty of gaining a unified view of print data and reporting. Central ReportsCentral Reports provide a consolidated data and reporting view across multiple Application Servers. Central Reports provide a large subset of the same reports that provided by the standard PaperCut reporting feature. solves this problem.
This section covers how Central Reports provides you with a consolidated data and reporting view across multiple primary/application servers (decentralized model). If you are using a single Application ServerAn Application Server is the primary server program responsible for providing the PaperCut user interface, storing data, and providing services to users. PaperCut uses the Application Server to manage user and account information, manage printers, calculate print costs, provide a web browser interface to administrators and end users, and much more. (centralized model) this is not required as the regular reports provide the data you need - see Reports.
A typical scenario is an organization with multiple sites and one Application Server per site. With Central Reports, organizations such as this can access consolidated reports for the entire organization.
Figure 63: Central Reports across multiple Application Servers
Central Reports works by running the same SQLStructured Query Language (SQL) is a special-purpose programming language designed for managing data held in a relational database management system (RDBMS), or for stream processing in a relational data stream management system (RDSMS). query on all remote PaperCut databases and consolidating the result. This is done by first concatenating the result data from all databases, then grouping, sorting and aggregating as appropriate. For this purpose, entities such as users, groups, printers and accounts are matched by name. For example, if print usage records matching username "Mary" are received from multiple sites, they are all considered as coming from the same user and are aggregated. In other words, users (and some other entities) are considered to be unique across all sites.
Most reports that are suitable for aggregation across systems are available in Central Reports. This includes the Executive Summary report and most usage reports. Not included are configuration reports, transaction reports and print log reports.
You can schedule Central Reports for automatic generation and email distribution just like standard reports.
Central Reports is not a centralized management system. Your multiple PaperCut Application Servers must continue to be operated and managed independently. All configuration and balances remain local to each Application Server, including user and shared accountA shared account is an account that is shared by multiple users. For example, in business, shared accounts can be used to track printing costs by business unit, project, or client. Organizations like legal firms, engineering firms, or accounting offices often have long lists of accounts, projects, clients, or matters. In a school or university, shared accounts can be used to track printing by departments, classes, or subjects. configuration, admin rights and user balances.