Re: We dont go for "uptime" records
Yes, that's generally a good policy. The time to find out whether a system restarts is not when you are trying to restart everything after a power outage.
Yes, there are likely caches in RAM which need to be rebuilt and will increase latency for a while.
Some years back I had an angry customer (investment bank) to deal with. One of our servers had crashed and taken down a trading application - despite being in a failover cluster. What the bank then discovered was that they didn't know how to restart the service - about 20 applications on a similar number of servers. The services had to be restarted in a specific order - which they didn't know since everything had been running for several years uninterrupted.
This is when I also learnt the lesson that the more somebody shouts at you, the more likely that it's their fault.