Redgate Monitor has been able to monitor replication for a long term, but it required some work from customers. Now we’ve added native monitoring.
This is part of a series of posts on Redgate Monitor. Click to see the other posts.
New Native Monitoring
The monitoring capabilities in Redgate Monitor were originally fairly limited to a few counters from PerfMon. A few people had written custom metrics on sqlmonitormetrics.com that clients could use, but we’ve had customers asking for more native integrations.
We’ve done it. With version 14.2, we have added an estate view of your replication environment. In the Estate menu, there is a new entry for Replication Monitoring.
If I click this, I get a list of the jobs running replication across various servers. You can see this below, with each instance and the job denoted by a REPL- at the start. These are the defaults that Microsoft sets up and should be left alone.
You can see below that the agent server name is listed, and I can click it to get to that server overview in Redgate Monitor. I also have the category and job name to the side. Beyond that we have the last completed run if it’s successful. If it’s running, the Job Ended is blank. To the right we have the publisher, subscriber, and distributor names.
I can resort the columns, such as below when I am looking by category.
I can also sort by publisher:
Or subscriber (or any other column).
Clicking the column a second time reverses the sort order.
Alerting
There are two new replication specific alerts available for the job failures and maintenance job failures. These work the same as any other alert in Redgate Monitor and can be configured for specific servers, groups, levels, etc., with notifications going out to all the notification targets.
Here are the alerts in the alert configuration.
These jobs run across the various replication categories: distribution, merge, snapshot, log reader, and queue reader.
If I look at the details, I can see the job failure works across multiple categories and is set to a high level alert. I can adjust this as I can with any other Redgate Monitor alerts, and exclude jobs if I wish with a regular expression.
The replication capabilities are documented here: https://documentation.red-gate.com/monitor14/sql-server-replication-314869637.html
Summary
Replication isn’t something most people use, but for those that do implement it, monitoring is critical. Redgate Monitor has added some native capabilities to let you get a glimpse of your entire replication estate at once and get notified if there are issues.
Replication can be amazing, but I find it brittle. When it works, it’s amazing, but when it breaks, it’s broken. Getting a jump on issues is important for many organizations and Redgate Monitor can help you do that.
Redgate Monitor is a world class monitoring solution for your database estate. Download a trial today and see how it can help you manage your estate more efficiently.