The status of a server is sent to the Activity page in the Visual DBA Performance Monitor window or the Replication Monitor window at server startup, shutdown, and in response to a ping operation. The ping operation returns the status of the server and its error count.

You can monitor your system more closely with the Send Notifications flag
(-MON). The -MON flag causes the servers to issue activity notifications.

The -MON and Send No Notifications (-NMO) flags control whether the server issues activity notifications. Every time a row is propagated to a target and every time a transaction is committed, a notification is sent (or not sent if -NMO is selected) that updates the Incoming Records, Outgoing Records, and Activity display fields in the Performance Monitor or Replication Monitor. The -MON and -NMO flags also cause the server to notify the Performance Monitor or Replication Monitor when an error occurs. The default is -MON.

Though the -NMO flag stops the server from issuing activity notifications on errors, you can ping a server to obtain its status, overriding any -NMO flag.