Keep track of your printer's usage with PaperCut Print Logger

Do you know how many pages were printed by your last cartridge before ink ran out? Is somebody using your printer while you were away? It's odd that no printer manufacturer provides software with their printers that can keep track of the printer's usage. Such printer monitoring tool is essential, particularly in an office environment, where office resources are often misused. If you are wondering why the printer cartridge ran out of ink prematurely, you need to get a print logger. In any case, printers often lie about ink levels. So you should have your own tools for keeping track of the number of pages printed by the printer.

PaperCut Print Logger is a free print logging application for Windows that provides real-time activity logs detailing the usage of all printers, local and networked. Information that are tracked includes:

• The time of print
• The name of the user who printed
• The total number of pages printed and copies made
• Document names and titles
• Other job attributes such as paper size, width/height, color mode etc

If your server is setup up to host print queues and workstations print to these shared queues, then Print Logger installed on the server will monitor all printing jobs. However, computers with individually attached printers will require Print Logger to be installed locally to monitor those printers. There is an option to ignore particular printers from monitoring, say a virtual PDF printer, which can be done by editing the configuration files.

The application runs as a service, secretly in the background, recording each use of the printer like a keylogger. The log files containing the printer's usage history can be viewed as HTML or imported as Excel sheets.

PaperCut Print Logger is essential for anybody who shares their printer on a network or for any printer which is accessible to other users.