Print Tracking

Print Tracking will record all print jobs in a central database and is intended to monitor printing usage on workstations and print servers. The collected information can be queried through the web reports to obtain information such as

Print Tracking also also allows you to assign print cost to print queues, allowing you to create invoices based on printer usage. You can set a default print cost for all printers (e.g. 5c per page) and set custom print cost for selected printers (e.g. 10c for color printers).

This feature works by intercepting Information events that are written to the application event log when Log Spooler Information Events is enabled in the Print Server Properties of the monitored host. As such, some requirements need to be met before print tracking can function properly. Please see Requirements for details.

Windows records print activity on the host where the print queue is located. As such, print tracking works best on networks where printers are shared on servers or dedicated print servers.

EventSentry can also track printing activity from printers directly attached to workstations. In this scenario, the EventSentry agent will need to be installed on all computers where printers are attached to.

EventSentry will collect the following print information on all supported Windows platforms:

Field	Description
Date / Time	Date and time when the print job was submitted
Print Server	The computer where the print queue is located, usually the print server
Print Queue	The name of the printer (queue)
Document	The name of the document printed
Document ID	The ID of the document printed, a number that is increased by one every time a new document is printed.
Username	The name of the user who submitted the print job
Pages	The number of pages printed
Size	The total size of the print job
Cost	The total cost, based on the number of pages printed and the cost per page

Since collecting print information does track a users activity to some extend, you will still need to make sure that collecting this information does not interfere or violate any corporate policies or laws in place.

Select "Track all except those listed below" to monitor all print jobs. To exclude certain users and/or documents, click the + button and specify the username or document to exclude.

To exclude a document from being tracked, enter either the complete document name or specify part of the document name (make sure to include * when wildcard support is enabled, e.g. *manual.doc) in the Document field. Enter a * for the username if you wish to exclude this document for all users.

To exclude a user from being tracked, enter either the complete username (DOMAIN\User) or part of the username (e.g. *User1). Enter a * for the document if you wish to exclude all documents of this user.

Select "Only track listed below" and click the + button to add users/documents (see previous paragraph) that should be tracked to the list.

Since print tracking needs to be enabled in the Operating System you can configure the agent to active it automatically if it isn't already activated. Please see requirements for more information.

If the database specified by the ODBC action is temporarily unavailable, then EventSentry will cache the pending print tracking data and run the transactions when the database server becomes available again.