Microsoft® SQL Server 2012 Unleashed

Monitoring Replication within SQL Server Management Studio

As you can imagine, SQL Server Management Studio provides considerable information about the status of replication. Most of this information is available via Replication Monitor. In Replication Monitor, you can see the activity for publishers, distributors, and subscribers; you can see all agent details; and you can configure alerts.

Through Replication Monitor, you also can invoke validation subscriptions processing to see if replication is in sync. You just navigate to the publication whose subscription you want to validate, right-click, and choose Validate Subscription option. This allows you to verify that the subscriber has the same number of rows of replicated data as the publisher. ...