Recently, Symantec Backup Exec was crashing quite regularly on me.Every Saturday at 4am, the main Backup Exec service would coem crashing down, taking the weekly backups with it and then causing my Monday morning to be painful (unless whoever was on call managed to see that the backups had stopped).

I know that this sort of monitoring should be done with something like SCOM, but that wasn't something I could do in this situation.

The solution was a PowerShell script running hourly (or more or less depending on the needs) that would look at the running state of all the Backup Exec services and start any that were not running, as well as send the person on call an email to tell them something bad was happening.

Using my standard template (see previous postings), I added one parameter to the script, $query, which is simply the query string that I would pass to get the services I want to monitor. For example, a query string of "backup*" will return all the Backup Exec processes, a string of "spooler" would return the print spooler.

The body of the script is pretty simple: