How to Monitor Print Services on Server 2008 R2

Many people have commented that there is no Print Server Management Pack for Server 2008 R2.

As of this writing – the current Print MP is 6.0.6392.0 which supports monitoring Print Services on Windows 2000, Windows 2003, and Windows Server 2008. However – when the Print Services Role is added to Windows 2008 R2, there is no monitoring.

Until there is an official management pack to handle Windows 2008 R2, I offer this addendum MP.

What I found, is that the Print Services Role in Server 2008 R2 is very similar to the Print Service Role in Server 2008. The key difference on the surface – is that the role has been renamed:

On Server 2008 it is “Print Services”:



On Server 2008 R2, it has been renamed to “Print and Document Services”:



I noticed that the discovery for Server 2008 Print Server Role is not discovering Server 2008 R2 print servers, and quickly see why. The Microsoft.Windows.Server.2008.PrintServerRole.Discovery uses a WMI query to discover this role. The query they used was:

SELECT Name FROM Win32_ServerFeature WHERE Name = "Print Services"

This is the primary issue. Since it was renamed – it was also renamed in WMI on Server 2008 R2. If we modify that query to:

SELECT Name FROM Win32_ServerFeature WHERE Name = "Print Services" OR Name = "Print and Document Services"

This will discover the print services on Server 2008 or Server 2008 R2. The Performance counters are the same between versions, and the service monitors work the same on either version.

I have created an addendum MP that will do a few things:

1. Contains an override to disable the Microsoft.Windows.Server.2008.PrintServerRole.Discovery discovery in the 2008 Print MP.
2. Contains a modified discovery which will discover print services on 2008 or 2008R2.
3. Contains an override to disable the Printer Object discovery.
4. Contains an override to change Printer Object discovery from 900 seconds to 14335 seconds.

After making these changes – my Server 2008 R2 print servers are discovered, and monitored. I tested stopping the spooler service, and it worked as designed. The performance views also started populating with data.


The primary reason I disabled the Printer Object discovery – is that these increase the instance space for no reason. There are no monitors or rules which target these discovered printer objects. They are simply discovered and not used. My recommendation is to leave this disabled, unless you have a very specific monitoring requirement to create monitors for these as individual objects, and show individual health state for printers. This does not exist out of the box. If you have any large print servers with hundreds of printers, this can be a lot of discovery data.


I still strongly recommend that you consider disabling the performance collection that is enabled for the Print Queue objects out of the box. This can be a VERY large amount of performance data that provides very little value. I discussed disabling these in a previous post – here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/kevinholman/archive/2008/08/27/print-server-mp-updated-added-support-for-server-2008-to-6-0-6392-0.aspx


The addendum MP is attached below:

Microsoft.Windows.Server.PrintServer.2008.R2.Addendum.xml.zip

Kevin...