As a sysadmin, the most meaningful thing for me was when someone—be it a developer, network person, security folk, or manager—gave me some heartfelt appreciation; something like, "Hey Scott, thank you. Your efforts are very much appreciated."

If you think about it, when was the last time you said: "Wow, that's a great roof, it always keeps me dry and is just really really good." Or, when did you last say: "Hey pipes, great job, there's always water when I turn on the spigot!"

Probably never.

Sadly, system administration is kind of the same. Customers, users, and business owners expect tremendous uptime the same way people expect their roof or water pipes to just always work. If your infrastructure generally works well and has good uptime, it's because there is someone there making sure that's the case.

Whether it is waking up in the middle of the night because of pages and alerts, working to troubleshoot issues when they arise, or dealing with equipment provisioning and decommissioning, systems administrators work in an often invisible way, to keep the whole thing going. After all, they have to meet strict requirements:

Five-9s uptime (99.999%) allows for .19 hours of unplanned downtime per year.

(99.999%) allows for .19 hours of unplanned downtime per year. Four-9s uptime (99.99%) allows for .88 hours of unplanned downtime per year.

(99.99%) allows for .88 hours of unplanned downtime per year. Three-9s uptime (99.9%) allows for 8.75 hours of unplanned downtime per year.

(99.9%) allows for 8.75 hours of unplanned downtime per year. Two-9s uptime (99%) allows for 87.6 hours of unplanned downtime per year.

If your organization is in the top two "9s," there's very little margin for error to maintain that that level of service. You should be super thankful for your system administrators for all those 9s.