We have publisher, subscriber, and distributor on separate servers. Replication is Push Transactional with replication agents setup to run under SQL Agent account context. We are in the process of disabling sa from everywhere and I am monitoring sessions that use sa to make sure there is no impact.
I see that log reader agent session sometimes uses sa as login name in its sessions on publisher. In sys.dm_exec_sessions, there are two columns for login: Login_Name and Original_Login_Name. The Login_Name shows sa. Most of the time the SPID of log reader agent on publisher shows the SQL agent service account as login name of the session. But sometimes the same SPID shows sa as login name. This always coincides with session running SP_REPLCMDS without any parameters and also messages like "The Log Reader Agent is scanning the transaction log for command to be replicated. Approximately...." in Replication Monitor. Normally, the session would run SP_REPLCMDS giving some parameters. When this happens, in sys.dm_exec_sessions, the log reader SPID keeps showing Original Login name as that of Distributor agent service account but login_name sa.
Does sp_replcmds run as sa? If I disable sa on publisher, distributor, and subscriber, will it break replication?