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Card class: Non-HeroCategory: Replication & Sharding

At a glance

Replica Set Members (state) is a live table listing every member of the replica set with its hostname and current state string: PRIMARY, SECONDARY, RECOVERING, STARTUP2, ARBITER, DOWN, and so on. It is the single-glance answer to “is the cluster healthy and who is taking writes right now?” A well-formed set shows exactly one PRIMARY and the rest SECONDARY (plus any ARBITER); anything else (a missing primary, a member stuck in RECOVERING, or a node reporting DOWN) means replication or failover is mid-flight and writes may be blocked.

What it tracks

The card is populated directly from rs.status().members, taking each member’s name (host:port) and stateStr and rendering them as rows in real time. There is no aggregation window; it is the instantaneous topology of the set. The healthy shape is one and only one PRIMARY with all data-bearing peers in SECONDARY. Transient states are normal during maintenance: STARTUP2 appears while a freshly added member performs its initial sync, and RECOVERING appears briefly during rollback or after a node rejoins. The states that warrant attention are a persistent RECOVERING (the member cannot catch up), DOWN or (not reachable/healthy) (the member is unreachable from the primary), or the absence of any PRIMARY (the set has lost quorum and is read-only until an election completes). This card carries no numeric alert of its own; its alerting partner is the Replica Set Member Lag >10s or in RECOVERING State card.

Reconciling against the source

Confirm against MongoDB directly by running rs.status() from mongosh on any member and reading the members[].stateStr field, or rs.isMaster() / db.hello() for the quick “who is primary” answer. On Atlas, the cluster topology view shows the same per-node roles and health. The Nerve Centre table mirrors rs.status() field-for-field, so any difference is a polling-interval timing gap during an in-progress election.

Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Replica Set Members (state) is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across MongoDB and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. Start for free or book a demo to see this metric running on your own data.