Monitoring Printers

Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Scripting Guide

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Even the most mechanically sound printer stops working or needs maintenance from time to time: Printers run low on toner, run out of paper, or get jammed unavoidable situations that prevent users from printing their documents.

Unfortunately, when a printer stops working, no notice is sent to users; in addition, users can still send print jobs to the printer. If the problem is not identified and corrected, those jobs will continue to accumulate as long as the printer is unavailable.

For these reasons, monitoring the printers in your organization is an important part of print management. With a well-designed monitoring strategy in place, you can receive timely notification whenever a printer stops functioning and take immediate steps to either get the printer back online or transfer print jobs to a different printer.

Printer status can be monitored by using the Win32_Printer class. A number of the Win32_Printer class properties relevant to status monitoring are shown in Table 13.2.

Note

• Not all printers support each of the properties listed in Table 13.2. If a printer does not support a particular property, the value Null will be returned as the value of that property.

Table 13.2   Win32_Printer Properties

Property	Description
Availability	Availability and status of the printer. Values are returned as integers and indicate the following conditions: 1 Other 2 Unknown 3 Running/Full Power 4 Warning 5 In Test 6 Not Applicable 7 Power Off 8 Offline 9 Off Duty 10 Degraded 11 Not Installed 12 Install Error 13 Power Save-Unknown 14 Power Save-Low Power Mode 15 Power Save-Standby 16 Power Cycle 17 Power Save-Warning
Description	Description of the printer.
Location	Physical location of the printer.
Name	Label by which the printer is known.
PrinterStatus	Status information for a printer beyond that specified in the Availability property. Values are returned as numbers and indicate conditions as follows: 1 Other. This value usually indicates that an error has occurred and that the print device has stopped printing. 2 Unknown 3 Idle 4 Printing 5 Warming up
ServerName	Name of the server that controls the printer.

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