My soaker hoses, and now my emitters, are not buried, but they are under landscape fabric, and are hard to locate, harder to see if they’re working. I hate them all, and am tempted to put in sprinkler heads.
Some can be pretty well determined, but yeah, others are a real shot in the dark. I got a decent soil moisture gauge, but anything but the most expensive are relative moisture (mine can be calibrated). And while it /says/ it measures just at its 14" tip, it doesn’t seem to vary much when inserted deeper. I don’t think I can rely on it to determine when to water. But yeah, I’d love to see an active moisture meter that would really tell us when to water. Until then, we all get to become amateur soil, rain and crop experts to try to understand all this. My Aerospace degree doesn’t help me much here (“Why, yes, as a matter of fact, I /am/ a rocket scientist! But /this/ is something else!”).