Working with systemd journals

Journaling

Article from Issue 181/2015
Author(s):

Systemd inaugurated a new journal system, journald. We look at how to view and interpret the new system logs.

If you are an ordinary user, you may barely notice systemd. However, if you administer a system, even if only your own, the time is overdue to learn a thing or two about systemd. A useful place to start is with its journals, partly because systemd handles journals in a very organized way, and partly because reading logs is essential to troubleshooting.

Systemd's journals are a replacement for the traditional syslogs. The traditional syslog daemon is gone from a systemd system and replaced by journald, although you might not have noticed because, for now, many distributions are forwarding systemd journals through traditional utilities in a default form similar to those with which you are familiar. You might not even have seen any new boot messages, because, at least initially, many distributions are shipping with the systemd journal not enabled.

If the journal is running, you will have a /var/log/journal file. If you do not, create the file and run the following command to set the proper permissions:

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