In this brief survey, we will remark the interaction among the Hessian tensor on a semi-Riemannian manifold and some of the several questions in Lorentzian (and also in semi-Riemannian) geometry where this 2-covariant tensor is involved. In particular, we deal with the characterization of Killing vector fields and the study of a set of consequences of energy conditions in the framework of standard static space-times.