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A lot of administrators are used to check their Active Directory replication status using replmon.exe which is a part of the Windows Server 2003 Support tools.
Today I stumbled across the need to use replmon.exe on a domain controller running Windows Server 2008, and was unable to find it.

It turns out that that this utility is not included in Windows Server 2008/2008 R2.

According to a comment from a team member from the Microsoft Directory Services Team, this is the explanation:

“Unfortunately, replmon did not survive the transition to Win2008. It was actually developed by MS support, not the product group (along with many other support tools/resource kit tools), and without an actual owner to service the tool years later, it was a casualty. I don’t see why it wouldn’t work on 2008 though…”

I wouldn`t recommend using unsupported tools on Windows Server 2008/2008 R2, so the advice would be to either use repadmin.exe on 2008/2008 R2, or to use replmon.exe from a Windows Server 2003 server.

You can find the command reference for repadmin.exe in Windows Server 2008/2008 R2 here.

A few examples:

repadmin.exe /showrepl shows the replication-status for the domain controller the tool are being run from.

repadmin.exe /showrepl servername shows the replication-status for the domain controller with the provided servername,

repadmin.exe /queue shows the replication-queue for the domain controller the tool are being run from.

repadmin.exe /queue servername shows the replication-queue for the domain controller with the provided servername,

repadmin.exe /replsummary shows a brief summary of the replication status.

I also checked if there are any PowerShell cmdlets for checking replication status in Windows Server 2008 R2, but it`s not. Hopefully this will be implemented some time in the future.

PS: I did test installing the Windows Server 2003 Support tools on a Windows Server 2008 domain controller in a lab environment, and it does work.