Provided is an image forming system capable of dead/alive monitoring without adding a special apparatus.An information-transmitting unit of an image forming apparatus transmits management information. A management-information-acquiring unit of a front-end server acquires the management information from the image forming apparatus. An analyzing unit of a back-end server analyzes the management information acquired by the management-information-acquiring unit. An interval-instructing unit of the front-end server, at specified time intervals accumulates instructions for the analyzing unit. The dead/alive-monitoring unit counts the number of messages not acquired by the analyzing unit, and when the number of messages is equal to or greater than a specified threshold value, determines the analyzing unit is not operating.