Troubleshooting Missing Logs in systemd-journald on Linux

🔗Debugging steps when journal logs are missing

Follow these debugging steps, when systemd service is running, but logs are missing in journalctl:

1. sudo -i if not already.
2. Try running journalctl -b to see messages from the current boot.
3. If you still get -- No entries --, run journalctl --verify.
4. If you get No journal files were found, something is corrupted with the journal service itself. Run systemctl status systemd-journald*
5. If the services are all “green” (active/running), something is borked with the log files in /var/log/journal/<hash>. Try running the following to recreate them:

systemctl restart systemd-journald.service

https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/538881

In my case, I had a fresh droplet created on DO but journal entries were missing for all services. Doing a sudo systemctl restart systemd-journald.service fixed this weird as hell issue.