Hi,
Manual monitoring is not the best thing to do. There could be problems during the time you're not there that may not be detected on time or may not be detected at all. You can't depend on the devices' internal memory for logging because it stores only a small amount of data. If you don't have a syslog server to store all logs, you won't be able to troubleshoot when needed.
Additionally if you need to monitor the network utilization, you have to use software to do so. You can't depend on manual monitoring because you can't tell what's going on when you're away.
There are some really great utilities out there and many of them are free. What exactly would you like to monitor?
Best regards,
Giorgos
