The heart and health of your replication system is embodied by the Replication Monitor as shown in Figure 14-46. It should be noted here that the Replication Monitor appears under the same SQL Server that is publishing and subscribing by the way it was set up. You will only find a Replication Monitor under a server that is configured as a Distributor. If this is the first time you have opened the Replication Monitor tree view item or you have not set an refresh frequency and have not disabled this dialog, you will see Figure 14-44.

Configuring a refresh rate for the Replicaton Monitor.

Click the Yes button to display Figure 14-45.

Configuring a refresh rate for the Replicaton Monitor.

You have two options for monitoring replication. You can monitor it dynamically within the Replication Monitor or via Performance Monitor. For our purposes, we will utilize the first option. If you select the Performance Monitor tab, you will be able to specify a settings file to use to monitoring purposes. It should be noted that the interval you specify will place a load on your server. This is a balancing act. You always want up to date information for monitoring purposes, but you don’t want to impact your system’s performance. You will have to determine what is the correct balance fro your system keeping in mind that you can set up alerts in the SQL Server Agent to help detect problems in your replication system. Leave the defaults as they are and click the OK button.

Replication Primer 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40