When relying on manual monitoring, administrators or support engineers will frequently have to check the state of different components. For Azure resources, the Azure portal can be used to set up dashboards so the state of any relevant resources can easily be understood.

Manual monitoring is a matter of good discipline and agreements between all involved stakeholders about who is monitoring what, when monitoring must take place, and who must be notified in various scenarios. This may not be so much of a problem during the regular business week, but during holiday seasons, for example, it absolutely needs to be clear who is responsible for what.

For somebody who needs to take care of someone else's monitoring tasks during holidays, it can be quite easy to forget about these tasks, as these tasks will be new and additional to their own usual workload. There is also a huge risk of monitoring tasks not being completely clear or being subject to regular changes. So, tasks will have to be described in a handbook, which needs to be maintained regularly.