Are your subscribers in the same physical location as the publisher? If they are, what kind of network connectivity do you have between them (10\100 or gigabit?)? If you're local...

SQLH2 is good for baselining. Performance Dashboard reports are good for reporting\troubleshooting on current activity. Neither are really suited for automated monitoring\alerting. I'm not saying don't use them - just...

Have you looked at Operations Manager?

Are you also going to be responsible for end-to-end monitoring and alerting of the Operating System, e.g. drive space, services, patches, etc.?

More information required...Does your procedure delete anything from the publisher? Are you replicating delete statements at the publisher? Could you provide the text of your procedure so we can...

If you're looking for OS level configuration information (e.g. what services are running, how many processors, etc.) try this:

Network documentation with SQL 2005 and SYDI

Part of what I suggest requires...

Or since you're sysadmin you could just use "EXECUTE AS" once you've made your connection to the server. See BOL here for more info.

...though if you're sysadmin it sounds odd...

Don't forget about DBCC SHOWFILESTATS. It works on a single database at a time, and only shows data file info.

For log file info there's also DBCC SQLPERF(LOGSPACE) which shows log...

To clarify, the proxy account comes into play when a user that's not a member of the sysadmin role executes xp_cmdshell. You can impersonate a non-sysadmin user using the EXECUTE...

Yes, it's right in BOL here and here. You create a proxy account for xp_cmdshell to run as.

I confirmed that you can access DFS shares with no problem. We use...

If you have not disabled the default trace you might just be able to figure out what happened. The default trace captures 5 MB of data then rolls over to...

"enough" is relative to what you want to do. If this is a development environment and you're trying to test functionality then you don't need a lot of horsepower. On...

Two more things to watch out for that I've seen:

1) Parameter sniffing. I've had some queries which are rock solid in 2000 completely tank in 2005 because of parameter sniffing....

Yes, the distributor is the workhorse for replication. The publisher simply writes entries to the transaction log. The distributor is what holds the distribution database containing all the replicated commands...

Never received a response to this...so I figured it out for myself. I wrote a blog post about it for anyone who is interested in understanding what these two values...

You are correct - changing the collation on the DB does not change the collation on columns. However, you could easily write a script that would look for the old...