Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

Monday Monitor Tips: Native Replication Monitoring

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.

December 15, 2025
Advice I Like: Art

Superheroes and saints never make art. Only imperfect beings can make art because art begins in what is broken – from Excellent Advice for Living

Interesting advice for living here. What is art? For many of us this is a painting, a piece of music, a theatrical performance, maybe a garden. In those cases, often inspiration comes from something broken. A broken heart, a tragedy, maybe something else.

Even in software, where I work, we might seek to create something amazing, an artistic piece of code, because we’ve seen other things that were broken and caused problems.

However.

What about love songs, the inspiration of which might be something great. I looked for some, but in most of the lyrics, there seems to be something broken. I Will Always Love You is popular, but seems to be a relationship that isn’t amazing. Something, one of my favorites has the idea that the the author doesn’t know. There’s some lack of confidence.

Maybe the best one I found is Just the Way You Are (Billy Joel, not Bruno Mars). Here the author doesn’t care about any sort of imperfections of problems, and doesn’t seem to imply there are. He just says I accept you for what you are. That isn’t broken.

In most other songs, the singer, or the object of their affection is broken in some way, so maybe there’s more to this advice than I thought at first.

I’ve been posting New Words on Fridays from a book I was reading, however, a friend thought they were a little depressing. They should be as they are obscure sorrows. I like them because they make me think.

To counter-balance those, I’m adding in thoughts on advice, mostly from Kevin Kelley’s book. You can read all these posts under the advice tag.

December 12, 2025
Keeping MS Docs Up to Date

One of the things that I like about the SQL Server docs (MS Learn Docs) is that I can fix things I find wrong. For years we had downloaded Books Online from installs, then we have BOL on a site, but those were mostly updated when a new release came.

Now we have MS Learn, and a regularly changing set of docs. If you haven’t taken advantage of these docs for SQL Server, you should. Bookmark: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/sql-server/?view=sql-server-ver17&redirectedfrom=MSDN

I help change those. It’s part of my contribution as a Microsoft MVP, but it’s also something that I enjoy because it makes my life easier. This post will look at how I do this.

Note: You need a GitHub account.

A Recent Change

Someone posted a note about multi-column primary keys, noting that the docs said we could use up to 16 columns, but they were able to do 17. I went to this page, Primary and Foreign Key Constraints , where in the first bullet list, there was a 16. This was the week of 24 Nov.

Now, a week later as I write this, it says 32.

When I saw the 16, I decided to test things. I set up scenarios, I checked against multiple versions, and I verified that 32 was the right number.

Then I clicked this edit button on the page:

When I did that, I was sent to the GitHub repo for the docs, which is in the MicrosoftDocs org. You can see what I see below. A lot of this is their markdown template, and can be ignored.

On the right is a pencil edit button. I clicked that.Note this says I’ll get a fork of this repo. That’s what I want.

When I click the pencil that, I go to the same page, but without any rendering. Note I’m still in the MS repo, but the blue note at the top says my changes will be written to my repo in a new branch.

When I knew I had seen an error, I scrolled down in the page and found the list. Here we see my 32 highlighted. This said 16 a few weeks ago.

I can edit this, so I’ll change this to 64. Don’t worry, I can’t affect the live docs. When I do this, I’ll then click “commit changes” in the upper right.

After clicking this, I get a commit dialog. Copilot tries to guess what I’ve done and it’s a good start. I typically edit the description a bit.

Once this is done, and I click Propose changes, I get a pull request page. In this case, notice in the top image, I see this is going from my repo, from a specific branch, to the MS repo for comparison. I’m asking them to pull my changes.

Below this, I see the file(s) changed. In this case, one change.

I typically just click “Create pull request” for my changes and then the MS automation takes over. A form appears that shows the PR created and the status (if it can be merged). Since these are quick, usually there’s not problem with a clean merge.

I get an email from the automation thanking me for the contriution, letting me know an author has been notified.

If there are comments, I’ll get emails on those. When this happens, sometimes they let me know there is something else needed or I should amend my PR. Sometimes they tell me they’re closing the PR and incorporating the change into something else. I’ve had my change get someone thinking and they might take my idea and add something else in their own internal PR.

If someone approves my PR, they’ll add a tag from their side, and the change is merged and a rebuild happens. Here’s the email I get.

Then my change is live pretty quickly.

I probably submit 5-10 a year, almost one a month. I don’t find a lot of issues, though I do sometimes take the time to add a new example that might serve me, or others. I should do more of those.

If you want to submit your own corrections, feel free. If you don’t, and want me to do it, send me a note and I’ll submit the PR.

December 10, 2025
A Note and a Message: T-SQL Tuesday #193

This month Mike Walsh hosts T-SQL Tuesday. It’s been quite some time since he hosted (back at #4), but he answered my call for hosts and I appreciate that. He has a really good end of year invitation that asks us to look to the past and the future.

I’m trying to keep T-SQL Tuesday alive, but I’ve been struggling for hosts. I need more of you to host, and more people to blog.

Blogging is incredible for your career. Take some time to get started, and if you do nothing but respond to these monthly blog parties, you’ll look better than most other candidates for jobs.

If you want to host, ping me on X or at sjones at sqlservercentral dot ***.

A Message to Steve in 2015

The world seems to be changing quite quickly in in our lives. You bought a new Pebble watch this year, database automation is becoming a bigger part of your job, and there’s lots of data analysis you can do.

Power Bi is a tool from Microsoft that is going to grow in popularity and it’s a place you ought to invest. New places to store data, new features in SQL Server, new platforms for building analytics will appear, but Power BI is a place you should spend more time in and improve your DAX skills.

Learning to build better visualizations, especially for your volleyball coaching (which is going to continue for some time), is an investment that will really pay off in the future.

A Word from the Future in 2035

Steve,

we spent a lot of time early in our career working with networks, helping manage accounts, users, security, privileges, and more. That knowledge and experience helped us understand SQL Server and other database platforms as well from the security standpoint.

Starting in 2026, you need to revisit some of those skills, ensure you better understand how authorization and authentication works in the context of AI and agents. AI technology is changing the world, and it’s going to be heavily used by agents, but security and ensuring there are limits placed on them is going to define who has more success with AI and who has more trouble.

Take the time to ensure that as you engage with MCP servers, task agents with work, and evolve the way you use AI that you include governance in your efforts to protect yourself from runaway agents that might go beyond what you expect, or spend more money than you want them to spend.

Enjoy the next decade, it’s going to be amazing.

December 9, 2025