What's the right way to monitor systemd services status

Question

I'm trying to figure what's the right way for me to be notified when some systemd service is having problems. Manually checking systemctl status isn't a sustainable option; at the very least I want to have a simple tray icon, like just green or red. Some sounds and/or visual notifications can be useful too. Surprisingly I don't seem to find any existing tools for that, so the best I can think of is to write my own, maybe some simple bash script which would poll systemctl once in a while, and update the icon status.

Pretty poor but alas.

Before I actually start spending time on that, want to make sure, am I by any chance missing some better options?

systemd has a dbus interface which you can use to subscribe to events -- see `dbus-monitor` and similar. — Chris Down, Jul 05 '21 at 22:56

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 06 '21 at 11:55

0

sudo systemctl --type=service

sudo systemctl --state=active  

sudo systemctl --state=failed 

journalctl -b -p err

These should be enough to monitor and to find any misbehaving services.

answered Jul 06 '21 at 11:55

rosecamposea

31
1

Your answer assumes I'm gonna be executing those commands manually, but as I mentioned in my question, checking it manually isn't a sustainable option. I have better things to do, you know; and I just need some status icon plus ideally some visual+sound notification when something breaks. And when I get that notification, _then_ I'm going to get logs etc. – Dmitry Frank Jul 06 '21 at 16:04
1

@DmitryFrank so your computer will play marche funebre, you will start fixing the service, then immediately after, you will get a support call and tell them you are on it. – nurettin Jul 24 '22 at 06:34

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited Apr 09 '23 at 12:14

Use the check_systemd command line tool from the Nagios monitoring plugin collection. You can just call this without parameter or setting up Nagios (which is a hell to do).

On Ubuntu you only need to call:

sudo apt -y install monitoring-plugins-systemd

and then you can check

/usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_systemd

If $? is 0 all is ok, if 1 its bad and 2 if its critical

All other return values should tell you to get the heck out because the world is on fire.

What's the right way to monitor systemd services status

2 Answers2