Universal Print Logs and Alerting overview (Preview)

Logs and Alerting lets Universal Print stream printer health, print job, and billing telemetry directly into your own Azure Monitor Log Analytics workspace, where you can query, visualize, and alert on it with the standard Azure Monitor tools.

Because the data lands in a workspace you own in your Azure subscription, you control retention, access, and cost — you pay Azure Monitor ingestion and retention charges directly to Azure. Universal Print delivers telemetry to your workspace through a Data Collection Rule and doesn't keep a separate copy.

Note

Logs and Alerting is the feature name used throughout this documentation. In the Universal Print admin portal, the corresponding page is labeled Logs and alerts.

Ready to turn this on? Go straight to Set up Universal Print Logs and Alerting.

What data Universal Print sends

Once enabled, Universal Print writes to three custom tables in your workspace:

Table Contents
UniversalPrintPrinterHealth_CL Printer status and health events
UniversalPrintJob_CL Print job lifecycle and metadata
UniversalPrintBillingSummary_CL Aggregated billing/usage records

You choose which of these categories to send when you enable the feature. For a full description of every column in these tables and how to use it, see the Logs and Alerting data reference.

Telemetry is captured from the moment you enable the feature onward — there's no historical backfill, so events that occurred before you enabled it won't appear in your workspace.

Telemetry typically appears in your workspace within a few minutes of the underlying event — a print-job update or a printer-health change. Billing records are aggregated and arrive on a periodic roll-up rather than in real time, and you should allow extra time right after you first enable the feature. For details and what to check if data is missing, see No data or delayed data.

How it works

Universal Print uses Azure Monitor's direct-ingestion pipeline. Setup is a one-time, three-phase flow:

  1. Deploy the destination infrastructure in your own subscription — a Log Analytics workspace, the three custom tables, and a Data Collection Rule (DCR). A deployment package (PowerShell script, Bicep, or ARM template — run from the command line or deployed directly in the Azure portal) creates these resources and grants Universal Print's service principal the roles it needs to write to them.
  2. Enable the feature for your tenant from the Universal Print admin portal, pointing it at the workspace and DCR you just created and selecting which log categories to send.
  3. Query, visualize, and alert on the data using Kusto (KQL), Azure dashboards, Azure Monitor workbooks, alert rules, or exports to Excel and Power BI.

Universal Print writes telemetry to your workspace through the DCR; you own everything downstream of that. The DCR uses Azure Monitor's direct-ingestion pipeline, so no separate Data Collection Endpoint (DCE) is required.

What you need to get started

Requirement Details
Azure subscription A subscription where you can create a Log Analytics workspace and a Data Collection Rule, and assign roles.
Same Microsoft Entra tenant Create the workspace and DCR in the same tenant where Universal Print is used. Universal Print grants its service principal the ingestion role (Monitoring Metrics Publisher on the DCR) in that tenant, so a workspace in a different tenant won't receive data.
Azure permissions Owner (or Contributor + User Access Administrator) on the target resource group to deploy, and Reader on the workspace and DCR to enable and query. See Azure permissions.
Directory role Printer Administrator (or Global Administrator) to enable the feature in the admin portal.
Licensing No additional Universal Print license is required beyond your standard Universal Print subscription. You pay Azure Monitor charges for the workspace you own (see Plan for cost and retention).
Availability Logs and Alerting is in preview and rolling out to tenants on an allow-list in the Azure Public (commercial) cloud. Government and sovereign clouds (Azure US Government, Azure China) aren't supported yet. If the feature doesn't appear in your admin portal, contact your Universal Print representative.

Plan for cost and retention

Because the workspace is yours, you pay Azure Monitor's standard ingestion and retention charges directly to Azure — there's no separate Universal Print charge for the telemetry. Billing starts as soon as you enable the feature and select Save, and scales with how much data you ingest and how long you retain it.

  • Estimate and manage costs with Azure Monitor Logs cost calculations and options.
  • The deployment sets default retention for the print-job table that you can tune at deploy time with the PrintJobRetentionInDays and PrintJobTotalRetentionInDays parameters (listed in the PowerShell tab of Step 2; the same parameter names exist in the Bicep and ARM templates). The printer-health and billing tables inherit the workspace default retention (30 days unless you've changed it).
  • To change retention after deployment — for any of the three tables — edit it on the workspace or per-table in the Azure portal. See Configure data retention and archive in Azure Monitor Logs.
  • To stop new charges, disable the feature; data already ingested remains billable until it ages out or you delete it.

Security and privacy considerations

The telemetry includes operational metadata your organization is responsible for protecting:

  • User identifiers — the print-job table records the user who submitted a job (for example, CreatedBy).
  • Printer location — the printer-health table includes location metadata (country, city, and organizational hierarchy).
  • Usage and billing — aggregated counts of jobs and pages.

Because the data lives in your own Log Analytics workspace, you control who can read it. Restrict access with Azure RBAC on the workspace, set a retention period that matches your compliance needs, and govern any exports (CSV, Power BI) the same way you treat other sensitive operational data.

Next steps

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