After installing the Intuitive for PaperCut MF on-premise solution and running the ETL application, you should start to notice data flowing into the dashboards.
However, in some cases, some customers may have unintended or lack of data in certain fields. This document will detail those fields, and how you may troubleshoot them.
Starting with the printers, the key field we use to track devices are serial numbers. They’re a key metric as devices can be renamed and moved around the estate, and it should be a single, unchangeable identifier that we can use to track historical printing over time.
When a device is added or readded to PaperCut MF, behind the scenes in the target database, that device is assigned new ID’s and potentially new names, which would ordinarily present a problem for tracking. By using the serial number as an unchanged, static measure, we can use that to present that devices’ printing, copying, faxing and scanning accurately over time.
One scenario, however, may be that the current serial number is incorrect. Since we're performing a lookup of the device, the device's serial number may also be currently incorrect, with one support use case being a serial with just a single number.
If in Intuitive you are presented with a field called <unknown> for a device’s serial number, it’s a good indication that the target device performing that job / presenting that overall volume does not have a serial number attached to it.
It’s a similar problem for the users themselves inside the dashboards, where the user may present an <unknown> in the Department field, which can be down to a missing Department against that user.
Another area to mention are how jobs are recorded at that point in time. When a user performs a print job, it’s a record of the device’s name at that time, and any associated costs (if they are being used) – at that time. However, for Departments and Accounts (Cost Centres) it’s a record of how it stands ‘now’.
One quirk of Users, Printers, Accounts and Servers tables relate to how long the PaperCut MF environment was set up, and when Intuitive was installed. If you recall to the installation of Intuitive for PaperCut MF, we request up to two years’ worth of information. However, in some cases, the accounts, printers, servers and users may have existed for more than two years, and have never been edited since. In this case, you may notice that some of these items therefore display as ‘<unknown>’, and that’s likely due to that data not being generated by PaperCut. In that scenario, you would therefore need to alter the ‘properties’ file for the Data Integrations tool to request data back to when the installation of PaperCut MF first occurred.
For the above scenario, one alternative to generating all of the data from scratch is to create a second properties file, but just to include the target table you require and the time period that is appropriate. Then, you can ‘merge’ the two CSV output folders to give you the older CSV data for the missing data points. For advice on real-world examples, you may contact our Support team to learn more.