Using systemctl - The Ultimate Guide To Logging about:reader?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffanyv88.com%3A443%2Fhttps%2Fwww.loggly.co...

loggly.com

Using systemctl - The Ultimate Guide

To Logging
5-6 minutos

Systemctl is an extremely powerful Linux utility that comes with

systemd. It comes with a long list of options for different
functionality, the most common of which are starting, stopping,
restarting, or reloading a daemon. In the following examples, we
will see how we can use systemctl for some of the
troubleshooting purposes.

Listing Units

To check which services are installed in the local Linux system,

execute this command (we are assuming you are the root user).

# systemctl list-unit-files --type service

This should show a list of service units installed in the server

regardless of their state (enabled, disabled, or static):

UNIT FILE STATE

arp-ethers.service disabled

auditd.service enabled

[email protected] disabled

1 de 7 23/3/23, 19:02
Using systemctl - The Ultimate Guide To Logging about:reader?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffanyv88.com%3A443%2Fhttps%2Fwww.loggly.co...

avahi-daemon.service enabled

brandbot.service static

...

console-getty.service disabled

console-shell.service disabled

cpupower.service disabled

crond.service enabled

...

firewalld.service enabled

[email protected] enabled

...

nginx.service enabled

...

rsyncd.service disabled

rsyslog.service enabled

sshd-keygen.service static

2 de 7 23/3/23, 19:02
Using systemctl - The Ultimate Guide To Logging about:reader?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffanyv88.com%3A443%2Fhttps%2Fwww.loggly.co...

sshd.service enabled

[email protected] static

...

Note, we’ve included only service units here. If you want to

check other types of units, you can use appropriate options in
the type parameter. This is a quick way to check if a particular
application (e.g., MySQL) is available in the server.

Although checking installed services in a system is useful for

administration purposes, we would be more interested in
services that are actually running or currently active in memory.
There are two ways to check this. The first method will show us
which service units are currently loaded and active. The list-
units parameter with systemctl is used in this case.

# systemctl list-units --type=service

The output shows services that are currently loaded and active
in memory. However, some services could start and then exit
after spawning another service or doing some function. They
may still be active, as shown below:

Output of running systemctl list-units. © 2019 SolarWinds, Inc.

All rights reserved.

3 de 7 23/3/23, 19:02
Using systemctl - The Ultimate Guide To Logging about:reader?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffanyv88.com%3A443%2Fhttps%2Fwww.loggly.co...

In the second method, you can further fine-tune this command

to list only the running services.

# systemctl list-units --type=service --state=running

The following command shows the resources a service unit will

depend on or the resource units that will depend on this service
in recursive manner.

# systemctl list-dependencies <service_unit_file>

Running this command against the mysqld.service shows too

many dependencies to list all at once, but here’s an excerpt.

List of dependencies when running the MySQL service. © 2019

SolarWinds, Inc. All rights reserved.

Failed Units

To see which units failed to load or activate, run this command.

# systemctl --failed

The output may or may not show any results. But if there are
units that failed to load or activate, they’ll be listed here. In the

4 de 7 23/3/23, 19:02
Using systemctl - The Ultimate Guide To Logging about:reader?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffanyv88.com%3A443%2Fhttps%2Fwww.loggly.co...

command output shown below, we can see the kdump crash

recovery service failed to activate.

The apache2.service unit failing to start. © 2019 SolarWinds,

Inc. All rights reserved.

If you suspect a particular service failed, you can use the is-
failed parameter with systemctl. Taking the example of
apache2.service, if we execute the following command:

# systemctl is-failed apache2.service

failed

The output is shown as failed. The same test against the crond
service shows us it did not fail.

# systemctl is-failed crond.service

active

Enabled Units

An enabled unit will automatically start on boot. To check if a

service is enabled, use the following command.

# systemctl is-enabled <service_unit_file>.service

So, if we want to check if syslog service is enabled, the

command is.

# systemctl is-enabled rsyslog.service

Depending on the state, the output may be enabled or disabled.

5 de 7 23/3/23, 19:02
Using systemctl - The Ultimate Guide To Logging about:reader?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffanyv88.com%3A443%2Fhttps%2Fwww.loggly.co...

Systemd-analyze

Another systemd tool called systemd-analyze can provide

valuable information about total time taken by the boot process.
Executing this command.

# systemd-analyze

will show an output like this:

Startup finished in 8.462s (firmware) + 6.281s (loader) +

14.170s (kernel) + 8.684s (userspace) = 37.598s

graphical.target reached after 8.679s in userspace

To see what time each service unit took to load during boot, use
the systemd-analyze command with the blame option.

# systemd-analyze blame

The output will be like this.

25.265s accounts-daemon.service
2.161s mysql.service
1.448s cloud-init-local.service
1.221s systemd-udev-settle.service
1.014s ifup-wait-all-auto.service
853ms cloud-init.service
697ms cloud-config.service
...

As you can imagine, this can be a valuable tool to consider if

your server is taking a long time to boot and you’re not sure
what the cause is. Using the output from this command you can
start troubleshooting individual services that are taking too long
to load. A good tutorial on systemctl can be found
in DigitalOcean. Another quick reference is in techmint.

6 de 7 23/3/23, 19:02
Using systemctl - The Ultimate Guide To Logging about:reader?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffanyv88.com%3A443%2Fhttps%2Fwww.loggly.co...

7 de 7 23/3/23, 19:02