To manage your print environment effectively, it’s essential to truly understand your print environment. And that understanding can only come about through insight into print activity and printer usage as well as micro- and macro-level printing trends.
That’s why we developed PrinterLogic Insights, a reporting and monitoring feature for PrinterLogic SaaS customers who want to brighten the darkest corners of their print environment. It’s ideal for small to medium businesses (SMBs) that want to keep on top of their own corporate printing and cut costs. It’s also incredibly useful for managed print services providers that want to offer optimized printer support and better serve their SMB customers.
Some insight into PrinterLogic Insights
Just what does PrinterLogic Insights enable your SMB to do? Well, the answer is actually twofold.
First and foremost, PrinterLogic Insights provides you with valuable, comprehensive information on all kinds of print activity throughout your organization—things like printer issues, per-user page counts and recent print jobs. That gives you unprecedented visibility into your print environment.
The second aspect is what you gain from that unprecedented visibility. With robust, hard-to-capture data in hand, it now becomes actionable. You can be aware of print jobs that might contain confidential information, identify employees or departments with excessive printing habits and provide better printer support to your end users.
Here’s a small sample of what PrinterLogic Insights can do:
- Track print costs: PrinterLogic insights can translate your page counts into real-world costs. And that’s not just any brand of networked printers. It applies to USB-connected printers as well. This feature is especially valuable to managed print services providers who have to deliver periodic reports on print usage and justify efficiencies.
- Store print job metadata: The metadata that’s associated with every print job—info like the initiating user, the workstation, the job name, the selected paper size—can be stored in the internally managed database. That makes it super easy to audit both recent and historical print activity.
- Log scan/copy activity: Capturing print-job data is great, of course, but scanning and copying can account for a high proportion of usage on multifunction devices. PrinterLogic Insights can view that activity on supported devices to provide a more accurate reflection of the entire print environment.
- Monitor printers’ SNMP status and get alerts: The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is a widely adopted framework for keeping tabs on the state of networked devices. PrinterLogic Insights can interface with SNMP-capable printers to provide real-time updates and keep IT apprised of problems.
Those capabilities can help you make more informed decisions and streamline corporate printing on an ongoing basis.
For example, tracking print costs and copy activity can be used to reveal the “hidden” costs of your print environment. You can then tackle those costs through waste-reduction initiatives. Determining the total cost of printing (TCP) for your organization might also raise a timely debate on whether it makes sense to contract with a managed print services company.
With SNMP monitoring, on the other hand, IT admins and support staff can get out of the furious cycle of response mode. Instead they can be more proactive. If a printer sends an alert that it’s running low on toner, your internal IT department or your managed print services provider can perform the easy fix before it becomes a full-blown problem for end users. One automated warning is better than a dozen urgent calls to the help desk asking for printer support.
Popular types of print reports in PrinterLogic Insights
While PrinterLogic Insights is capable of generating reports based on any number of variables, there are a couple types that almost every organization finds helpful.
- User audit: This shows per-user print activity and allows you to view who made certain changes to their printer settings.
- Workstation report: Find out where the PrinterLogic client has been installed, what version it’s running and the last time it checked in.
- Print job audit: Simply specify a date and time to see print statistics with easy-to-read charts and graphs. Or view a report that shows print job timestamps—right down to the name of the printed file.
This short video showcases some of the features and possibilities of PrinterLogic Insights.
Fast to deploy and free to use for up to 10 printers
PrinterLogic Insights leverages the same technology as the built-in print auditing and reporting feature in our full-featured printing platform. That’s what the Orthopedic Institute of New Jersey used to make more informed business decisions—like being more intentional in its consumables usage and purchasing (read the case study here). And because it’s based on the same foundation as our popular serverless printing infrastructure, PrinterLogic Insights doesn’t require additional infrastructure.
Best of all, it doesn’t cost anything to gain access to this information and guidance. PrinterLogic Insights supports unlimited users and is completely free of charge for up to 10 networked printers. Larger organizations and managed print services providers can easily upgrade for additional printer support if necessary.
Rolling it out is super quick too. Signing up only takes seconds. And once you’ve deployed the software client to the workstations you want to include, you can start accessing and leveraging your vital corporate printing data within a matter of minutes.