FMAudit Question

[Guest]

We have recently started using FMAudit and only after a month we are starting to notice that the failure rate of reporting is high. Looking on forums and surfing the internet is not giving mush information other than a few posts:

"My company has been using FMaudit for about a year and half. I think the thought was to eliminate the few people we had calling customers for meter reads. The opposite has happened. Now all of our IT staff is involved in troubleshooting why accounts drop off FMaudit. We have hundreds of accounts and the list of accounts that have stopped reporting is always 30 or 40 accounts long. Plus, sometimes individual copiers fall off of larger accounts. It seems to be an endless mess and has made collecting meter reads very complicated. I was wondering if anyone else has any experience and opinions with FMaudit. Does your company use a different product that works well? Thanks!" (Copier Network Forum)

Is this a common issue with FMAudit, I am getting the same kind of results only after a couple of months. I would really appreciate any feedback.

[juliano]

Re: FMAudit Question

We use this software and have done so for about 2+ years......machines do drop off reporting but when we investigate 99% of the time it is due to some change or another at the client site.....MS updates to servers and so on......overall our experience is good
It has certainly made our meter readings easier.......each month we have to collect readings the old fashioned way for maybe 1% of our fleet...it is rare fro an entire site/client to drop off in our experience.....and if it does it is always caused by a change at the client site..what we do see occasionally is an individual machine dropping off....normally simple resolution such as network cable unplugged!!

[ctchubb]

Re: FMAudit Question

We use this software and have done so for about 2+ years......machines do drop off reporting but when we investigate 99% of the time it is due to some change or another at the client site.....MS updates to servers and so on......overall our experience is good
It has certainly made our meter readings easier.......each month we have to collect readings the old fashioned way for maybe 1% of our fleet...it is rare fro an entire site/client to drop off in our experience.....and if it does it is always caused by a change at the client site..what we do see occasionally is an individual machine dropping off....normally simple resolution such as network cable unplugged!!

Thank you so much for your reply! What percentage of your total accounts stop reporting per month?

[sdrawkcab]

Re: FMAudit Question

As Juliano says, our success rates are also quite high, it always comes down to site specific issues that cause the problems.

Are you installing the onsite installer on the customers server or a PC? if a PC is it possible it's being turned off/on and missing the scheduled scan?

Does a customer have a proxy that needs configuring to allow communication? (also firewalls and AV) or anti intrusion software.

The large accounts that drop individual devices, are they perhaps set to dhcp and are falling outside the subnet range you have set?

Is there a brand/model of printer that is more prone to failing?

The answer will be at the sites, the fun is, of course, trying to find it.