[blueplanet200]

It sounds like "they don't know why it's going down." I've worked with plenty super competent people that have taken time to root cause incidents.

Guide to incidents: Step 1: Stop the bleeding Step 2: Prevent it in the future

Doing Step 1 doesn't make you incompetent.

[raffraffraff]

I'm not a DBA, and maybe you're not a DBA either, so this question goes to DBAs who may be reading: aren't you always better off killing the bad queries instead of rebooting the whole box, if that's an option? (ie: aside from times when the entire host is screwed, load per core is >50, metrics aren't getting out, you can't ssh in etc)