How do you manage the InfoPrint Manager accounting logs?

Once you specify log-accounting-data=true on either an InfoPrint Manager server or an actual destination, these accounting logs start growing without bound. As part of your scheduled system maintenance, the accounting logs should be managed carefully to avoid potential performance problems. Periodically, the log files must be either deleted or moved to a different folder. If you do not do either of these tasks, your server will run out of space on the disk drive, preventing you from printing any more jobs.

The Windows accounting logs are in a subfolder of the server's folder. This describes the subdirectory where the files are located in: 

 $ProgramData$\Ricoh\InfoPrintManager\var\pd\accounting.logs
InfoPrint Manager for Windows provides two accounting logs for each destination:
  • actual_destination_name.accounting.log.v1 storing accounting information for successful jobs
  • actual_destination_name.accounting.log.error storing accounting information for error jobs
where actual_destination_name specifies the actual destination where the job is processed.

To save a record of InfoPrint Manager server accounting data, you need to move the existing log files to a new drive. Be sure that these logs are not being written to, then use this procedure:

  1. Create a new directory in the location where you want to archive the existing (prt1.accounting.log.* ) log files by moving to that location on your system (from the command line prompt, specify E:, then cd \ntserver).

    To create the new directory, type: mkdir 3qrt2001logs

  2. Go back to your C drive to the folder where the log files are located in. Then access that location by specifying:

    cd$ProgramData$\Ricoh\InfoPrintManager\var\pd\accounting.logs

  3. Copy the prt1.accounting.log.* files to a new directory on a different drive (E for this example) named 3qrt2001 by specifying: 
    copy prt1.accounting.log.* E:\ntserver\3qrt2001logs\
    This command copies the existing files to the new directory
  4. Remove the original prt1.accounting.log.* files from the $ProgramData$\Ricoh\InfoPrintManager\var\pd\accounting.logs folder: 
    del prt1.accounting.log.*

    When the next job is processed on prt1, InfoPrint creates a new accounting log file.

We recommend that you move the data to another disk drive rather than deleting it from the system. This lets you store accounting data and delete it from the system when you no longer need to refer to it. To delete the prt1.accounting.log.* files,

  1. Specify cd$ProgramData$\Ricoh\InfoPrintManager\var\pd\accounting.logs

    This command moves you into the correct path.

  2. Enter 
    del prt1.accounting.log.*

    When the MS-DOS command-line prompt returns, you know that the prt1.accounting.log.* files have been deleted from the system.

  3. Enter 
    dir

    This command displays the contents of your directory for you to verify that the files have been deleted. When the next job is submitted for printing to that actual destination, InfoPrint creates a new accounting log file and writes the data into that file.

The pdaccount command only finds and processes the information in the log files in the original location. Once you move or rename the files, you cannot use the pdaccount command to summarize the data. You might want to use the pdaccount command to find and process the information and summarize it, store the summaries in a different location, and then delete the logs.

Important: Requesting information for all or error accounting records can consume a lot of the server’s memory since all the data is read into memory to be sent to you. If you have a lot of data to retrieve, you should consider requesting it for smaller time periods and concatenating the returned data.

For example, to retrieve all the accounting records for a one month period, you could issue four pdaccount commands like this: 

pdaccount -t all -s '00:00:00 AM 03/01/00' -e '00:00:00 AM 03/08/00' 
Server A >March1.accting.data
pdaccount -t all -s '00:00:00 AM 03/08/00' -e '00:00:00 AM 03/15/00' 
Server A >March2.accting.data
pdaccount -t all -s '00:00:00 AM 03/15/00' -e '00:00:00 AM 03/22/00' 
Server A >March3.accting.data
pdaccount -t all -s '00:00:00 AM 03/22/00' -e '00:00:00 AM 03/31/00' 
Server A >March4.accting.data

Parent topic: Working with InfoPrint Manager server accounting information