Check For Non Running Distribution Agents

Today I am going to share with you a SQL Script that can help monitor the status on your distribution agents in a snapshot/transactional replication topology.

Despite their being some built-in monitoring for replication agents in the Replication Monitor, one that seems to be missing is checking for the agents updating the distributor. Sure there’s ones for agents shutting down for whatever reason, but sometimes latency can be reported as “excellent” for a subscriber despite not having updated the distributor for some time. And because it has not updated the distributor, there’s no calcs for transactional latency, which means that whilst on the surface everything is fine, you are slowly heading towards a real headache with replication.