CommVault's new Remote Operations Management Service (ROMS) will watch your backups for you, assuming, of course, you use CommVault's Galaxy backup program. And if you spring for the diamond level, a human being will even call you in the middle of the night to discuss what went wrong.

Backup administrator is a thankless job at best. People only notice when something goes wrong and then they’re breathing down your back, acting like 6-year-olds in the back seat, saying "When will we be back up?" instead of "Are we there yet?" As a result, most small and midsize IT departments stick the new guy with being "Backup Monkey."

That poor guy has to change, catalog, and ship tapes and check every morning to see if last night's backups ran successfully. When they don't, the poor newbie is stuck trying to troubleshoot which jobs failed and talking to tech support in Bangalore while the newest backup of the new Oracle server is 3 days old.

Even worse, after a few mind-numbing weeks, they stop diligently checking logs and rely on the backup program to e-mail when something goes wrong. As a consultant, I've made some real money helping folks recover when they finally figure out that the backup server can't e-mail them when it crashes.

Priced on a per-server basis, ROMS installs an agent on your backup servers and reports status back to CommVault. You get a Web dashboard that gives you a quick view of status and lets you drill down on servers, and jobs, that are reporting problems. At the gold level a completely automated system correlates multiple alerts, locates knowledge base articles that relate to your problems, and sends you an e-mail. At the platinum level, a real human being gets involved and, if necessary, captures log files and opens a ticket for you.

Sure beats the no news is good news system, don't it?