Modern document capture systems (such as IBM Datacap, Kofax from Tungsten Automation and DocProStar from TCG Process) are the backbone of many enterprise workflows, processing vast amounts of documents, forms and invoices every day. Keeping these systems running efficiently and without disruption is mission-critical. Most capture platforms come with their own vendor-supplied monitoring tools, however many organisations are discovering that pairing Grafana with Prometheus offers a more powerful, flexible, and transparent alternative, allowing them to more effectively monitor their document capture systems.

Why Traditional Monitoring Falls Short

Vendor-supplied monitoring tools often:

• Offer limited customisability
• Restrict visibility to pre-defined metrics
• Require additional licensing or proprietary integrations
• Provide outdated or clunky user interfaces
• Can only be used with the vendor’s own solution

As a result, these limitations hinder proactive monitoring, especially in environments that require operational agility.

Enter Grafana & Prometheus

In contrast, Grafana and Prometheus offer a modern, open-source alternative.

Prometheus is a powerful open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit, ideal for collecting time-series data. Grafana is the visualisation layer, turning raw data into intuitive dashboards, graphs, and alerts. Together, they empower teams to build highly tailored monitoring solutions — ideal for all aspects of capture systems, from the import mechanisms, the server processes that extract and match the data, to those that export the documents and data to the line-of-business systems.

Key Benefits:

1. Real-Time, Custom Dashboards
• Visualise queue sizes, error counts, batch statuses, and system performance metrics.
• In addition, you can build panels to show active processing, delays, or exceptions in real time.
2. Vendor-Neutral Integration
• Export data from SQL Server, logs, or custom scripts into Prometheus.
• Monitor not only the capture system, but also the infrastructure it relies on (e.g., databases, file systems, servers).
3. Alerting and Automation
• Set thresholds for errors, delays, or missing data and trigger alerts via email, Slack, Teams, or PagerDuty.
• Automate escalations and reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR).
4. Historical Insights
• Over time, you can analyse trends to identify recurring errors, performance bottlenecks, and usage peaks..
• Great for SLA reporting and capacity planning.
5. Transparency and Collaboration
• Grafana dashboards are easily shareable with operations, support, and development teams.
• Role-based access control ensures security while promoting cross-team visibility.

Real-World Use Case: Monitoring Batch Errors

Imagine a scenario where batches are failing due to OCR engine timeouts or corrupt documents. Instead of relying on nightly reports or combing through logs, teams can take advantage of real-time monitoring.

For instance, a Prometheus script can query the capture system’s database for batches with error status.

• Prometheus exposes the results as custom metrics (e.g., capture_batch_errors{module=”Server”}).
• Grafana displays these in a real-time dashboard with panel colouring based on error count.
• When error counts exceed a threshold, Grafana immediately alerts support staff, enabling them to act without delay.

Consequently, support staff can act immediately when issues arise.

To enable proactive monitoring, we built a custom dashboard by querying the Tungsten Capture database directly, extracting key performance and operational metrics—such as batch statuses, and the health of individual components. We expose these metrics through a custom exporter and sent to Prometheus in a format it can scrape at regular intervals. This approach allows us to transform raw data from the Tungsten Capture backend into structured, real-time metrics that fuel our Grafana dashboards, providing clear and actionable insights into the system’s health and activity.

Here’s an example of a Grafana dashboard powered by data sent from a Tungsten Capture database to Prometheus. The item in red indicates that some form of intervention is required and an alert could be sent to a support team.

Other Monitoring Tools

While we’ve implemented our solution using Prometheus and Grafana, the architecture is flexible and not limited to these tools. Since the monitoring setup extracts data directly from the solution database and exposes it in a standards-based format, customers can integrate this data into their own existing monitoring platforms—whether that’s Splunk, Datadog, Zabbix, SolarWinds, or other enterprise solutions. As a result, organisations can maintain centralised observability across all systems without adopting a separate toolset, making the solution adaptable to a variety of IT environments.

Conclusion

While vendor tools may fulfil basic monitoring needs, but modern IT environments often demand more depth and flexibility. Grafana and Prometheus offer a powerful, cost-effective, and highly customisable approach to monitoring capture systems. Whether you’re troubleshooting an issue, planning infrastructure upgrades, or just want better visibility, Grafana & Prometheus put the power in your hands.

They are not just limited to monitoring capture systems either – Grafana & Prometheus can be used to monitor and report on many other aspects of your organisation’s IT infrastructure.

Whether you’re resolving issues, planning infrastructure improvements, or seeking better visibility, Grafana and Prometheus give you the tools to succeed. Ultimately, this leads to a smarter, more proactive approach to monitoring.

Curious about how this works in practice? We’d love to hear from you! Drop your questions or thoughts in the comments below — whether you’re exploring monitoring options, facing challenges with your current setup, or just want to dive deeper into the technical implementation details. Let’s start a conversation!

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