Configure PaperCut NG/MF system health monitoring

There is an enormous range of open source and enterprise level monitoring tools available (such as PRTG, Zabbix and Nagios). However, they all have a common purpose of keeping you informed of the state of your servers, applications, services, and infrastructure. You can use data collected by these tools in a variety of ways. For example, the data could be graphed to allow analysis of ongoing system performance and reliability, so that informed decisions can be made about resourcing. For more immediate feedback about PaperCut NG/MF, you can also configure alarms that are triggered by status changes. For example, a log entry could be recorded when a server’s CPU utilization passes a certain threshold, or an incident ticket could be opened when network bandwidth becomes saturated, or perhaps an email could be sent when a particular application becomes unavailable.

The PaperCut NG/MF System Health JSON REST APIApplication Programming Interface (API) is a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software and applications. An API expresses a software component in terms of its operations, inputs, outputs, and underlying types, defining functionalities that are independent of their respective implementations, which allows definitions and implementations to vary without compromising the interface. endpointAn endpoint is a connection point where HTML files or active server pages are exposed and can be accessed by an external application. Endpoints provide information that can be consumed by an external monitoring tool. is accessible via HTTP. Your monitoring tool can retrieve the values collected by this interface and consume the data in a user friendly way.

The way in which you configure your monitoring system to use the PaperCut NG/MF System Health interface data is dependent on the tool you are using, however, the high-level steps are the same:

To configure a monitoring tool to perform a PaperCut NG/MF system health check:

1. Discover the printer and device status URLs in the PaperCut NG/MF Application ServerAn Application Server is the primary server program responsible for providing the PaperCut user interface, storing data, and providing services to users. PaperCut uses the Application Server to manage user and account information, manage printers, calculate print costs, provide a web browser interface to administrators and end users, and much more..

2. If you want to monitor the status of individual printers or devices, export a list of printer and/or device status URLs.

3. Install the monitoring tool on a server that can access the PaperCut NG/MF Application Server.

4. In your monitoring tool, authorize access to the secure System Health interface: http://[primary_server]:[port]/api/health/ in one of the following ways. The way in which this is done is dependent on the monitoring tool.

   • send an HTTP GET request

     Send an HTTP GET request to the following URL: http://[primary_server]:[port]/api/health/application-server/status?disk-threshold-mb=1&Authorization=[authorization key

   • add the authorization key to the HTTP header

     For example, the HTTP header is Authorization:4hZiSw8S1dbWFQ8XFmizf7r76Xqwy1kE.

     NOTE

     This method is not as secure as sending an HTTP GET request from the monitoring tool.

5. In the monitoring tool, add the endpoints that you want to monitor. For more information about the available endpoints, see PaperCut NG/MF System Health interface reference.

   NOTE

   For each endpoint, configure all attributes, such as the polling interval, the event to trigger an alarm, the event to trigger a notification and so on.

6. If required, configure alarm notifications in the monitoring tool.

7. Test the PaperCut NG/MF System Health interface integration.

Check out the list of monitoring tools we’ve used with the Print System Health Interface—see Supported Third Party Monitoring Tools.