Journal

How to see logs

You may have noticed that you are not able to see system logs. By default, it requires root access because it can expose sensitive information collected from system services, kernel messages, user sessions, and background daemons.

To safeguard this data, systemd restricts access to the system journal. However, you don’t always need to have root privileges. Non-root users can read logs if they are part of either the systemd-journal or the adm group.

You can add your user to this group with:

sudo usermod -a -G systemd-journal $USER

or

sudo usermod -a -G adm $USER