Monitoring Local Printers

Besides monitoring network printers, MyQ is able to monitor the number of printed pages on devices connected locally, via a parallel port or a USB port. In such cases, the number of printed pages is extracted from the print spooler as it is being processed by the print driver.

To extract the data provided by the spooler, you need to install the MyQ Desktop Client application to all the computers that you print from to MyQ, and set up Local Print Monitoring there. All jobs sent to selected types of ports will be detected from the print spooler.

Local Print Monitoring is available in MyQ Desktop Client for Windows 8.2+ and MyQ Desktop Client for macOS 10.0+.

A disadvantage of the local print monitoring feature is its inaccuracy. As the communication of MyQ and the local printing device is one-sided and restricted to sending print data to the device, it is not possible to check if the data is actually printed. Therefore, MyQ charges the number of pages extracted from the spooler when they are sent to the printing device. Even if the print job is canceled halfway through the print, it is charged as a whole.

Accounting on local printers

After a print job is sent to one of the local printing devices, the number of pages and other information about the print job are saved to the MyQ Desktop Client folder of the particular registry file. Once the connection with the MyQ server is established, all the information is automatically transferred to the MyQ server and deleted from the registry. Therefore, it is not necessary to be permanently connected to the MyQ Server online.

Once the server is connected and data is sent to the server, information about the job appear in an Info entry in the MyQ log. Each entry contains information about the user who printed, the printing device that the user printed on and the number of printed pages. The MyQ server automatically creates a new local type printing device. Its name has the following form: printer@computer.

An appropriate price list can be set for local printing devices. Therefore, they can be included in the monetary reports. If the user that prints on the local printing device already exists, their prints are simply assigned to them. Otherwise, the job is accounted to the *unauthenticated user.