Linux system logs

Log files and journals are important to a system administrator's work. They reveal a great deal of information about a system and are instrumental during troubleshooting and auditing.

Log files contain events and messages generated by the kernel, applications, and users that log into the system.

Use rsyslog

Syslog and rsyslog have long been used to provide logging on Linux servers.

Log command in linux

Systemd became the default service manager with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7, and it introduced its own logging system called systemd-journald. systemd-journald continues to be the logging mechanism on RHEL 8 and 9 while keeping rsyslog for backward compatibility.

The rsyslog service keeps various log files in the directory.

You can open these files using native commands such as , , , , , and so forth, depending on what you are looking for.

For example, to display boot and other kernel messages, view :

Use and other filtering tools to gather more specific events from a file.

You can also use to view files as they are updated:

In the comma

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