Systemd

List status of services

# list status of all services
systemctl status

# list status specific service
systemctl status yourservice

List all systemd timers:

systemctl list-timers
    NEXT                          LEFT          LAST                          PASSED  UNIT                         ACTIVATES
    Wed 2018-06-27 16:45:01 CEST  2h 16min left Tue 2018-06-26 16:45:01 CEST  21h ago systemd-tmpfiles-clean.timer systemd-tmpfiles-clean.service
    Thu 2018-06-28 07:31:00 CEST  17h left      Wed 2018-06-27 07:31:25 CEST  6h ago  pli-puppet-run.timer         pli-puppet-run.service

    2 timers listed.
    Pass --all to see loaded but inactive timers, too.

Logs

All systemd logs end up in journald. One important exception is sssd which provides authentication against Active Directory. Its logs can be found in /var/log/sssd.

Debug Service Start Failure

Wrapper to Catch Output

To catch all the output in a file write a small wrapper:

#!/usr/bin/bash

LOGFILE=/tmp/test.log
echo "$(date): " "$@" >> $LOGFILE 
exec "$@" &>> $LOGFILE

and store it e.g. as /root/systemd_debug_starter.sh. Then inject it into the daemon startup in the unit file with

ExecStart=/root/systemd_debug_starter.sh $ORIGINAL_EXECUTABLE

then you need to run

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl start $SERVICE

and check out the log file.

Strace

If the error is more subtle, like problems with SIGPIPE, strace can be useful to unveil the problem. You may inject strace into the daemon startup in the unit file with

ExecStart=strace -D -f -o /tmp/strace.txt $ORIGINAL_EXECUTABLE