A server, image forming apparatus, image forming system, or monitoring method allows an administrator an intuitive, visual grasp of the status of an image forming apparatus and helps reduce the load on network communication. The server has a template code/character data acquirer that acquires, from an image forming apparatus having a display displaying a panel image, a template code corresponding to a template image included in the panel image and character data included in the panel image; and a panel image generator that reads, from a storage storing a template image, the template image corresponding to the template code and that generates the panel image by combining together the template image read and the character data acquired from the image forming apparatus.