Monitor Toner Levels

Seeing toner levels

1. Go to Monitoring → Printers and open a managed printer.
2. The Overview tab shows a bar per cartridge — black, cyan, magenta and yellow — at its most recent reading, alongside waste level where the printer reports it.
3. The Usage tab shows how those readings have moved over time.

Levels come from the agent's SNMP poll, so they are as current as the last poll (every 15 minutes by default) and only exist for printers the agent can reach.

Automatic toner ordering

Plenix can order the cartridge for you when a colour drops below its critical threshold — 10% by default. This is a separate, lower trigger than the 20% warning level shown on the Overview tab, which just flags the colour as low without ordering anything.

This only happens on printers that are on cost-per-print billing — a printer with no mono or colour page rate is monitored but never re-ordered for, because the toner is not yours to supply.

The critical threshold is not fixed platform-wide. It resolves in this order:

1. A per-printer override on that printer's Billing tab, if one is set.
2. The tenant default, set once for every printer under Admin → Toner Fulfillment → Tenant Default Thresholds.
3. The 10% fallback, if neither of the above is configured.

When it triggers:

1. Plenix looks up the SKU for that printer model and colour against your toner suppliers, preferring one marked preferred for that model/colour, then the lowest cost per unit among the rest.
2. If a SKU matches, a fulfillment is raised against that supplier — its cost is snapshotted onto the fulfillment for margin reporting — and Plenix automatically raises a linked purchase request in Purchasing for approval. An order email is also sent to the supplier, unless it's wired up to an API.
3. If no SKU matches, the fulfillment is still raised, marked out of stock, so it shows up rather than disappearing — and no purchase request is created since there's nothing costed to raise it against.
4. Only one open fulfillment exists per printer and colour at a time, so a printer sitting at 3% does not raise a new order on every poll.

Track them on the printer's Fulfillments tab, or across the whole fleet under Admin → Toner Fulfillment, where a supplier's SKU catalogue — cost, currency, and which SKU is preferred per printer model/colour — is also managed.

To alert on toner without ordering it, add a rule to a Printers alert template under Monitoring → Alert Templates using the toner metrics.

Where to go next

• Understand the whole module → Set Up Printer Monitoring — Complete Guide
• Next in this module → View Page Counts
• Fleet Overview
• Add a Printer
• See where this fits in the bigger picture → How a Device Problem Becomes a Fix