A good sysadmin is a good detective. You should make time as part of your job to pick on a machine every so often and examine it forensically, like a crime scene. What’s here that shouldn’t be? Are things working like they’re supposed to? Are there any problems with this machine that have gone unnoticed by the automatic monitoring?

Working scientists keep a lab notebook in which they write down everything they did, and what the results were. Sysadmin work is also about careful, scientific, detailed experimentation, especially when troubleshooting.