Monitoring and Troubleshooting Replication

After your replication topology is deployed, you can monitor it through a variety of programs (primarily Enterprise Manager). The easiest way to detect problems is by monitoring the Replication Monitor in Enterprise Manager. If a problem occurs in one of the replication agents, a red mark appears in the troubled agent and up the tree in Enterprise Manager, so you can see where the error occurred.

Another way to monitor your server's replication activity is through System Monitor (called Performance Monitor in Windows NT). You can simplify access to System Monitor by right-clicking on Replication Monitor and selecting Refresh Rate And Settings. Under the Performance Monitor tab, specify the location of the file that contains information about the agents. This is by default located in the C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\80\Tools\BINN\REPLMON.PMC folder.

Tip 

To access System Monitor quickly on Windows NT and Windows 2000 machines, you can right-click on Replication Monitor and select Performance Monitor.

If you're using transaction replication and you'd like to monitor the latency that it takes for the Log Reader to move data from the transaction log to the distribution database and then to the subscribers, you can use the System Monitor. The two counters you want to monitor to measure this latency are SQL Server Replication LogReader: Delivery Latency and SQL Server Replication Dist.: Delivery Latency.

Other counters you may want to monitor include the counters under the SQLServer: ReplicationAgents object. Under the object, there is an instance for each type of agent. Also, each agent has its own specific object that has counters that are customized for its solution. For example, the SQL Server Replication Merge object contains counters to monitor the number of conflicts resolved each second.

Installing SQL Server Service Packs

When installing service packs in a replicated SQL Server environment, you should watch your installation order since you're upgrading the system catalog with the service pack. Service packs also make changes to replication and you should upgrade your replicated topology in the following order:

  1. Distributor

  2. Publisher

  3. Any subscribers

Often, the publisher and distributor are on the same server. This simplifies things since you'll only have two components.




SQL Server 2000 for Experienced DBAs
ppk on JavaScript, 1/e
ISBN: 72227885
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 126

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