I'll help out on the tech side a bit.

Get a machine, any machine, lookup something called Nagios.

It can do passive read-only monitoring. Using public snmp data.

Setup MRTG at the same time. Asking him to direct logs to the machine as a tool for him. Make sure he feels it is a piece to HELP him. Cheerfull. Kind helpful things.

Use the trending in Nagios to help re-plan or improve. If he won;t then, just start using ICMP to monitor lag times, Nagios can be used to check services as well like SMTP, DNS etc...

It is cheap it works and is as passive as possible if he won't cooperate.

Luck man.