Systemctl status shows : “State: degraded”

Süleyman Çelik
1 min readDec 17, 2021

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systemd

When I run systemctl status, I get State: degraded at the top,

● x230
State: degraded
Jobs: 0 queued
Failed: 1 units
Since: Wed 2018-05-30 17:09:49 CDT; 3 days ago
....

What’s going on, and how do I fix it?

Best Answer

That means some of your services failed to start. You can see them if you run systemctl; without the status argument.

They should show something like,

loaded failed failed

Or you can just list the failed services with systemctl --failed, in my case it shows

UNIT                        LOAD   ACTIVE SUB    DESCRIPTION                
● postgresql@9.4-main.service loaded failed failed PostgreSQL Cluster 9.4-main
LOAD = Reflects whether the unit definition was properly loaded.
ACTIVE = The high-level unit activation state, i.e. generalization of SUB.
SUB = The low-level unit activation state, values depend on unit type.

Normally, you’ll need to read the journal/log to figure out what to do next about that failing item, by using journalctl -xe. If you just want to reset the units so the system "says" running with a green dot, you can run:

systemctl reset-failed

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Süleyman Çelik

Network Security Engineer, SOC-Siem Engineer, Cyber Security Researcher, Vulnerability Management Specialist | CEH | CNSS