Printer Monitoring

[John A. Murdie]

Over the years, my University Department has used Lexmark's MarkVision and HP's WebJetAdmin (and its predecessor JetAdmin) to monitor the status of our printers. In addition, we have used the queue listing facilities of whatever printing system we were using to watch the progress of the jobs in the print queues. Most recently, of course, we have been using the CUPS web interface. Both the printing system and the printers themselves have to be watched to assure continued operation. I wonder if anyone has written a free (as in speech) program which does this?

As MarkVision and Web JetAdmin have been developed, I feel that they have become more complicated to use - true, one can find out any aspect of a printer's configuration and status with them, but at the first level of operations, that's just too much. I'd like to see a program that displayed the statuses of printers in a matrix, with each printer represented by a fairly small square which displayed only:

   i) the printer name;
  ii) the printer type;
 iii) the printer's description and whereabouts;
  iv) the status message seen on the printer's own display;
   v) the number of jobs in the queue;
  vi) and how long the top job has been printing.

The printer square would be green if all was well (printing happily or waiting to print), yellow if there was an impending error condition (paper low, toner low etc), or if the top job had been `printing' for more than (say) 10 minutes, and red if there was a definite error (paper jam, printer off-line etc).

I find MarkVision and Web JetAdmin very tedious to configure despite their printer discovery mechanisms, so a design prerequisite for this program would be that it would not require to be configured with any details of the printers, merely to be told where the CUPS server was, from which it would determine the characteristics and whereabouts of all the printers.

It sounds almost like a modification of CUPS' own web management pages.

John A. Murdie