Greyed out menu options, broken activity monitor I recently installed SP1 on my 2012 SQL Server. Ever since then SSMS has behaved a little weirdly when I connect from my pc rather than from the local server itself.

I no longer see the green "running" icons on the server and on the agent, and several menu options are greyed out (Start/Stop/Restart on server menu and agent menu).



Also, when I try to access the Activity Monitor, I get the following error:



Error Detail

I found the following article about the Activity Monitor. I followed the steps there (although I am a local admin on the sql server and should have had all of those permissions already) to no avail. The server is running Windows 2008 R2 Datacenter SP1. When I remote desktop to the server itself and use SSMS directly I have none of these issues, and when a domain admin connects to the server through SSMS remotely everything also works for him.

Any ideas?
The behavior you are seeing happens if you aren't recognized as having permissions to manage services on the remote server.  This MSDN article describes some possible solutions on how to grant users rights to manage services.

Does the service account for the agent have local administrator permissions on the server?  Have you stopped and started database services and the SQL Server agent service on the server since encountering this problem?