Print Monitoring Server 2003

[wxrkny]

We are having trouble with users printing excessively at our company. We are looking to monitor the usage of the printers on a per user level and possibly charge back users based on their printing volume. Is there any way to do this natively in Windows or is a 3rd party application necessary. We need a way to track the number of pages a user prints over a period of time whether it be a month, 6 months, or a year. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[digip]

We have a print queue at work that keeps a copy of all pritned forms with info like the user attached to it, date, time sent, etc.

Now we do not monitor it for purpose of charging back to excessive use, but I imagine that some script could be written to calulate totals based on the users and number of documents/pages per month.

We use it mainly to hold work in case it needs to be reprinted becuase we do high volume printing on xerox docuprint 180's and in the vent that they fail or start marking up the documents, you need a way to reprint them quickly. We print about 300,000.00 pages per day on average if not more(not including other departments and month end statements, etc).

I am sure ther eis some sort of statisitcal software out there that does what your asking, but I do not think it is built in to windows. At least, the software were running is not a windows application, but it does run on top of Server 2003.

EDIT: Here is one I found just from searching Google. http://printer-activity-monitor.red-line-s...e.qarchive.org/

(http://www.google.com/search?num=50&hl=en&newwindow=1&safe=off&q=%22printer+statistics%22+server+2003&btnG=Search)

[SmoothCriminal]

Enable object access auditing on the computer hosting the resource, then go to the printer and enable auditing there as well (in the properties dialog box).  Then check your security event log and view the info you need.  I don't know if this will necessarily see how much they printed (it might), but atleast you can track how many times they printed.

[operat0r_001]

go crazy and setup a nagios server ;)

http://www.twatech.org/show.php?ep=296

I had all my servers monitor

cpu ram disk http services for content checking outside http and ftp check ( using siteuptime.com )    and evenlog filters

nagios is a bitch to setup but once you get it setup you can make custom monitor scripts for ANY service.

you may want to check out 'whatsup' its crap but it runs on windows and prob supports smtp or printer checks