When should you use journalctl basics?

When managing a Linux system, it is essential to have tools at your disposal for monitoring and troubleshooting logs. One such tool is journalctl, a command-line utility that allows you to view logs collected by the systemd journal service.

The primary occasions when you should use journalctl include:

• Diagnosing system issues or failures.
• Monitoring system service statuses and activities.
• Investigating security incidents by reviewing logged events.
• Tracking application-specific logs for performance tuning or error detection.

Here’s a basic example of using journalctl to view the logs:

In this command, replace <service-name> with the name of the service you wish to inspect. This will show you log entries related to that specific service.