The True Cost of Manual AVD Management

“We’ll just manage it manually.”

It’s a common response when organisations evaluate scaling automation tools. The logic seems sound: why pay for a tool when someone on the team can handle scaling decisions?

But this calculation misses the true cost of manual management. Let’s break down what manual AVD management really costs — and it’s probably more than you think.

The Visible Costs

These are the costs everyone considers:

1. Time Spent on Scaling Decisions

Someone needs to:

Monitor usage patterns
Decide when to scale up/down
Execute scaling changes
Verify changes were successful
Handle exceptions and issues

Conservative estimate: 30 minutes per day for a modest deployment.

Over a year, that’s 182 hours — more than four working weeks — spent on repetitive operational tasks.

2. Time Spent on Schedule Management

Before every holiday, someone needs to:

Identify the holiday
Determine impact on usage
Adjust scaling schedules
Remember to revert after the holiday

With 8-10 public holidays per year plus company closures, ad-hoc adjustments, and seasonal changes, this easily adds another 50+ hours annually.

3. Out-of-Hours Work

AVD doesn’t stop when your team goes home. Manual management means:

Weekend monitoring (or accepting no weekend optimisation)
Early morning scaling decisions
Late night verifications
On-call responsibilities

Even if this is just occasional, it impacts team morale and work-life balance.

The Hidden Costs

Here’s where manual management gets expensive:

1. Suboptimal Scaling Decisions

Humans can’t monitor systems 24/7. This leads to:

Slow scale-up: Users arrive at 9am, but nobody triggers scale-up until 9:15. For 15 minutes, users wait or get degraded performance.

Slow scale-down: The team goes home at 6pm, but nobody thinks to scale down until they check the next morning. That’s 15 hours of unnecessary capacity.

Missed opportunities: Nobody’s monitoring at 2am when usage drops to zero, so minimum capacity runs all night.

Quantified: Even a 10% inefficiency on a £10,000/month AVD deployment costs £12,000 per year.

2. Forgotten Holidays

Be honest: has your team ever forgotten to adjust scaling for a holiday?

It happens. People get busy. Holidays sneak up. Someone assumes someone else handled it.

Each forgotten holiday is a day of full capacity running for zero users.

Example: A 50-host deployment running on Christmas Day and Boxing Day when no one’s working. That’s 2 days × 50 hosts × 24 hours = 2,400 host-hours wasted.

At £0.10/host-hour, that’s £240 per incident. Miss a few holidays a year, and you’re looking at £1,000+ in unnecessary spend.

3. Single Points of Failure

Manual management typically means one person (maybe two) who “knows how AVD scaling works.”

What happens when they:

Go on holiday?
Get sick?
Leave the organisation?
Are simply unavailable?

Knowledge gaps lead to:

Scaling not happening
Wrong decisions made by unfamiliar staff
Emergency situations requiring expensive escalation

4. Opportunity Cost

Those 200+ hours your team spends on manual AVD management? They could spend them on:

Strategic projects
User experience improvements
Security enhancements
Learning new skills
Actually helping users

What’s the value of an IT professional’s time? At a loaded cost of £50-100/hour, manual management consumes £10,000-20,000 in opportunity cost annually.

5. Error Recovery

Manual processes mean manual errors:

Scaling down when scaling up was intended
Applying changes to the wrong host pool
Forgetting to revert temporary changes
Misconfiguring parameters

Each error requires:

Time to identify the problem
Time to fix it
Potential impact on users
Potential impact on costs

Conservative estimate: 20+ hours per year spent on error recovery.

6. Delayed Optimisation

Automated systems can react in seconds. Humans? Not so much.

When usage patterns change unexpectedly:

Automated system: Detects change, adjusts scaling within minutes
Manual process: Someone notices (eventually), decides what to do, implements change (could be hours or days)

During that delay, you’re either:

Overpaying for unused capacity, or
Underdelivering on user experience

7. Inconsistency

Manual decisions vary based on:

Who’s making them
What else is demanding their attention
How much information they have
Their personal risk tolerance

Automated systems make consistent decisions every time. Manual management introduces variability that’s hard to quantify but real.

The Total Cost

Let’s add it up for a typical 100-host AVD deployment:

Cost Category	Annual Cost
Time spent on scaling	£9,000-18,000 (180 hours × £50-100/hr)
Suboptimal scaling	£12,000+ (10% inefficiency)
Forgotten holidays	£1,000-2,000
Error recovery	£1,000-2,000
Knowledge loss risk	Hard to quantify
Opportunity cost	Significant

Conservative total: £23,000-34,000 per year

And this doesn’t include the intangible costs: stress, burnout, user frustration, and technical debt.

The Comparison

Now compare that to the cost of automation:

The Smart Scaler: A fraction of manual management costs
Implementation time: Hours, not weeks
Ongoing effort: Minimal oversight
Consistency: 24/7, every day, every holiday
Optimisation: Continuous, not occasional

The ROI calculation isn’t even close.

”But We Already Have Someone Doing This”

Yes, and that person could be doing something more valuable.

IT teams are stretched thin. Every hour spent on repetitive operational tasks is an hour not spent on:

Strategic initiatives
Security improvements
User support
Innovation

Automation doesn’t replace your team — it frees them to work on things that actually need human intelligence.

”But What If the Automation Goes Wrong?”

Valid concern. But consider:

Automation makes consistent, predictable decisions
Humans make variable, sometimes unpredictable decisions
Automation can be monitored and alerted
Human processes have single points of failure
Automation maintains audit trails
Manual changes are often undocumented

Well-designed automation is actually more reliable than manual processes.

Making the Case for Automation

If you need to justify automation to stakeholders, frame it this way:

Current state: We’re paying £30,000+/year in hidden costs for manual AVD management, plus consuming IT staff time that could be better spent elsewhere.

Proposed state: Automated scaling that costs a fraction of this, eliminates hidden costs, frees staff time, and provides better, more consistent results.

ROI: Payback in months, ongoing savings for years.

The numbers make the decision obvious.

Getting Started

Ready to stop the hidden bleeding of manual management?

Audit your current state — How much time does manual management actually consume?
Calculate your hidden costs — Use the framework above
Evaluate automation options — Look for tools that fit your needs
Start small — Automate one host pool and measure results
Scale up — Expand automation as you see results

Or simply try The Smart Scaler and see how much you could be saving.

The true cost of manual management isn’t what you’re spending — it’s what you could be saving. Start your free trial and let automation do the heavy lifting.