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Splunk Lantern

Managing printers in a Windows environment

 

Employees at your organization use a wide variety of peripheral devices with their Windows machines. These include internal devices, such as graphics cards, and external devices, such as monitors, printers, and USBs. Some of these are unique to individual employees and some belong to the organization and are used by many people.

You want to track how printers are used, both for security purposes and for uptime and proper functionality to keep the business running. You can use Splunk software to monitor usage and functionality of any device on your Windows network, such as printers, USB drives, web cameras, keyboards, and more. You might be called upon to look at usage in support of capacity planning, compliance, or even to help human resources track which employees might be thinking about leaving.

Data required

Microsoft: Windows event logs

How to use Splunk software for this use case

You can run many searches with Splunk software to manage peripherals in a Windows environment. Depending on what information you have available, you might find it useful to identify some or all of the following:

Next steps

The purpose of these searches is a mix of security, compliance, and capacity planning. Sharing this data with other groups is often beneficial. In addition, measuring impact and benefit is critical to assessing the value of IT operations. The following are example metrics that can be useful to monitor when implementing this use case:

  • Jobs per print server
  • Pages printed over time

This use case is also included in the IT Essentials Learn app, which provides more information about how to implement the use case successfully in your IT maturity journey. In addition, these Splunk resources might help you understand and implement this use case:

Splunk OnDemand Services: Use these credit-based services for direct access to Splunk technical consultants with a variety of technical services from a pre-defined catalog. Most customers have OnDemand Services per their license support plan. Engage the ODS team at ondemand@splunk.com if you would like assistance.