Network Printing

Using System Monitor

System Monitor allows you to observe counters for printing performance. It also supports setting alert levels for the counters being monitored. Individual counters and objects are present for each instance of a printer that is installed.

The two most critical performance counters for monitoring printing are the following:

Bytes Printed/sec. The number of RAW bytes per second that are sent to the printer. Low values for this counter can indicate that the printers are underutilized, either because there are no jobs, print queues are not evenly loaded, or the server is too busy. This value varies according to the type of printer. Consult your printer documentation for acceptable values for printer throughput.
Job Errors. Number of job errors. Job errors are typically caused by improper port configuration. Check your port configuration for invalid settings. A printing job instance will increment this count only once, even if it happens multiple times. Also, some monitors do not support this kind of error, causing the counter to remain at 0.

Collecting baseline data is an important step in monitoring all performance counters. For more information about System Monitor, see "Overview of Performance Monitoring" in this book.