1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a monitoring apparatus configured to monitor an image forming apparatus, the image forming apparatus monitored by the monitoring apparatus, and a monitoring system including the image forming apparatus and the monitoring apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
A known system for monitoring success or failure of change of a network setting and recovering the original setting in case of failure is available.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2001-251337 discloses a system in which a device instructed by a server to change its network setting recovers the network setting values before the change in the case where no instruction is given from the server within a predetermined period of time after the change of the network setting.
The technique described in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2001-251337 is suitable for the case where the server is controlling the change of the network setting. However, the technique is not suitable for the case where a key role in changing the network setting is played not by the server, but by a customer at which an image forming apparatus is placed.
In a system where an image forming apparatus at a customer's site is remotely monitored, various services are provided on the basis of counter information and error information communicated from the image forming apparatus to a remote monitoring server via the Internet. Because a network setting of the image forming apparatus can be implemented easily by the customer on an operation screen of the image forming apparatus, a network breakdown easily occurs due to an incorrect or mistaken change of the setting. In the remote monitoring system, a user of the image forming apparatus does not generally pay attention to the fact that the remote monitoring server and the image forming apparatus are performing network communication with each other. Thus, such an incorrect change of the setting may be left for a while without being corrected. In contrast, since the remote monitoring server detects the occurrence of a network breakdown or the like on the basis of the presence of once-per-day regular communication from the image forming apparatus, there may be a maximum delay of one day from the occurrence to the detection of such a communication breakdown. The remote monitoring system must detect a network breakdown as soon as possible, specify the cause of the network breakdown, and prompts an appropriate person in charge of maintenance of the image forming apparatus to take appropriate measures to correct the network breakdown because of the characteristics of such services as error monitoring and toner inventory management at the image forming apparatus.
As in the related art, in case of network breakdown, it is not suitable for the image forming apparatus to recover the original setting or to display an error on a screen of the image forming apparatus because of the following reasons.
Since a change of the network setting of the image forming apparatus is implemented by a system administrator in change of customer information, changing the setting for the sake of the remote monitoring server can be regarded as ultra vires.
Further, in the case where an error is displayed when the image forming apparatus' print operation including a copy operation except for communication with the remote monitoring server is normal, the user may be misled into believing that the image forming apparatus is broken although the operation used by the user is normal. An exemplary network setting that does not influence the use of the image forming apparatus and that hinders communication between the image forming apparatus and the remote monitoring server is a proxy server. A proxy server is used to establish connection from an intranet environment to an Internet environment.