Blue icon with question mark - what does it mean? The SQL Server instance is accessible and seems to be fine.


  Microsoft SQL Server 2016 (SP1-CU2) (KB4013106) - 13.0.4422.0 (X64)
  Mar  6 2017 14:18:16   Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation  Enterprise
  Edition (64-bit) on Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard 6.3  (Build
  9600: ) (Hypervisor)


But what does the white question mark mean?

these icons dont go away when I refresh.
I am sysadmin inside sql server and outside I am administrator on that box.





Another thing I noticed, you can see on the picture below.
These are 2 different Management Studio sessions.

On the top one, I am logged in as myself, DBA and sysadmin,  on the second one
I use Management Studio with run as a different user and I use a domain account that I use for the replication, which is not sysadmin.

The second one has the blue icon in this and other servers as well, whilst mine is the normal green one.
Enabling these Windows Firewall rules did the trick for me


Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI-In)
Windows Management Instrumentation (DCOM-In)


These two rules are predefined and you can enable them by right clicking and enabling these rules in Windows Firewall advanced settings

I Also opened port 135 in the windows firewall, but I don't know if this was really neccessary.

I now confirmed it for Windows Server 2016 and Windows Server 2019 and SQL Server 2017