Prerequisites for Central Reports

Your organization needs at least two production Application Servers to use 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.. You can configure Central Reports on one or both of these Application Servers. You can also configure Central Reports on a separate PaperCut installation used solely for the Central Reports feature.

In addition:

1. Each PaperCut 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. (including the reporting server) must be configured with an external database (see Deployment on an external database (RDBMS). This database must be accessible for read access from the central server by a nominated URL, user and password.

   Central Reports works by running 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). queries on the remote PaperCut databases directly. It is therefore possible as an alternative approach to use other mechanisms to replicate the remote databases to your reporting server and run reports from the local read-only replicas. This manual, however, documents only the usual approach of accessing remote databases directly.

2. All databases must be of the same type. For example, if you use Microsoft SQL Server at one site, this database type must be used at all sites, including the site doing the reporting.

3. You should ensure the same PaperCut version is installed at each location, including the central reporting location. More specifically, the databases at all sites must use the same database schema (which can change between PaperCut versions).

4. By default, Central Reports do not generate reports if any remote databases are unavailable or return errors. It is often better to log these events as errors rather than generate potentially incomplete and misleading reports. Central Reports has a Status page that gives you a quick snapshot of the readiness of the system and flags any errors.

   You can instruct central reports to generate reports even if some remote databases are unavailable. To configure, see Server Configuration.