Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Administration

16.6. Monitoring Replication

This section discusses three tools for monitoring replication: Replication Monitor, Performance Monitor, and the replication-related DMVs.

16.6.1. Replication Monitor

Replication Monitor is built into SQL Server Management Studio. It shows the status of replication and can be used to make configuration changes. It will also show the current latency and the number of commands outstanding. It does not show the transaction or command rates; nor does it show any history of what happened at any time before the current snapshot of data was read.

You can invoke the Replication Monitor from Management Studio. Expand a publishing server and right-click the Replication folder to launch it, as shown in Figure 16-28.

To look at subscription status, double-click any entry of the All Subscriptions tab to bring up a window where you can easily view reports and the status of publication to distribution, distribution to subscription, and undistributed commands. It is a user-friendly tool that provides a good overview of all your replication status information.

Tracer tokens are a way to measure the current performance of replication. The Tracer Tokens tab is shown in Figure 16-29. You can think of a tracer token as a dummy record that the Replication Monitor uses to gauge the performance of your replication model. It can give you a pretty good idea of latency among your publisher, distributor, and subscriber.

16.6.2. Performance Monitor

Several replication-related ...