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What roles do the publisher, distributor, and subscriber play in a transactional replication setup? How do you monitor the health and latency of a transactional replication setup to ensure subscribers are staying reasonably up to date? What steps are involved in setting up transactional replication for the first time between a publisher and a new subscriber? How would you troubleshoot a transactional replication setup where a subscriber has stopped receiving new changes entirely?
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How does replication compare to Always On Availability Groups for keeping data synchronized across multiple servers, and when would you choose one over the other?

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Answer

Always On Availability Groups are designed primarily for high availability and disaster recovery, keeping an entire database synchronized for failover purposes, while replication is more flexible for selectively distributing specific tables or subsets of data to multiple locations, often for reporting or integration purposes, making the right choice depend heavily on your actual goal, whether that is failover protection or targeted data distribution.
-- Availability Groups replicate the entire database
-- Replication can selectively publish just specific tables
EXEC sp_addarticle @publication = 'SalesPublication', @article = 'Orders'; -- only this table
Real-world example A company uses an Always On Availability Group for full database failover protection on their primary transactional database, while separately using transactional replication to distribute just a subset of reporting relevant tables to a dedicated analytics server.

Common follow-ups: Can replication and Always On Availability Groups be used together in the same environment?;What are the licensing differences between these two features?

Always On Availability Groups;SQL Server Architecture & Editions
All 7 Replication questions