PaperCut NG system health monitoring overview

The PaperCut NG System Health interface exposes endpoints that allow you to monitor the health of PaperCut NG and its connected infrastructure, using monitoring tools, such as, PRTG, Zabbix, and Nagios. Your monitoring tool does not have to be expensive or complicated, and as long as it has the capability to check whether a web page is up, you can configure it to monitor your print environment using PaperCut NG System Health interface. The interface also exposes detailed system health information in JSON format for more advanced monitoring tools and scripts.

You can use this information to:

• Trigger alarms for urgent print outages

  You can monitor and trigger alarms for the overall system status, as well as the status of individual components (such as, printers or devices). Triggering a notification as soon as events occurs rather than waiting for someone to contact you, allows you to address the issue immediately thus reducing downtime.

• Monitor real-time activity

  View real-time measurements of the number of print jobs, held jobs, errors, and warnings. Every print environment has it’s own heartbeat, for example, when to expect peak times and how many errors are deemed normal. By creating a real-time dashboard of your environment, you’ll get to know the heartbeat of your organization’s printing and know when to respond to changes.

• Plan future printing resource requirements

  You can plan for expansion and preemptively manage your printing environment to address bottlenecks before they occur. For example, you might want to view a graph of user license usage over time, so you can anticipate when you are likely to run out and ensure that does not happen.

• Monitor printer and device inactivity

  Changes in print usage can indicate that there is a problem with a printer, even if the printer is online. For example, if there has been no print activity on a frequently used printer for a long period of time, this could indicate that there is a problem, such as, a card reader not working, or the door to the print room being locked. Standard status alarms do not highlight these problems. PaperCut NG System Health interface allows you to monitor real-time activity to identify changes in printing behavior.

Your level of monitoring can be as simple as creating a single alarm for the overall PaperCut NG system health, or as comprehensive as providing alarms for individual components (such as, a specific printer) and generating graphs that show trends in printing patterns and resource usage over time. This allows you to quickly confirm that your printing environment is available, functioning as expected, and also anticipate any events that could impact your printing environment in the future.

The PaperCut NG System Health interface retrieves a wide range of information relating to the status of:

• Site Servers—details of any Site Servers that are offline. Use this information to trigger alarms, such as, an email notification.
• Print Providers—details of any Print Providers that are offline. Use this information to trigger alarms, such as, an email notification.
• Database—details of database connections. Use this information to monitor the status of the database load and availability.
• Devices—details of devices in error and devices that have not processed a job for a defined period of time.
• Printers—details of printers in error and printers that have not processed a job for a defined period of time.
• 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.—system information and resource metrics, such as, the amount of hard disk space available and the amount of memory used. Use this information for preemptive resource planning so you can address any potential issues before they impact your printing service delivery.
• License—licensing details. Use this information for capacity planning to ensure you have sufficient user and device licenses to support an expanding organization. This will prevent downtime due to over user limit license limitations.
• Statistics—system level statistics to help you track trends in your printing environment, including the number of print jobs, held jobs, errors, and warnings.