journald

  • journald is the part of systemd that deals with logging. systemd, at its core, is in charge of managing services: it starts them up and keeps them alive.
  • config 
    /etc/systemd/journald.conf

    Benefits

    1. Indexing
    2. Structured logging
    3. Access control
    4. Automatic log rotation

vs syslog

Journald provides a good out-of-the-box logging experience for systemd. The trade-off is, journald is a bit of a monolith, having everything from log storage and rotation, to log transport and search. Some would argue that syslog is more UNIX-y: more lenient, easier to integrate with other tools. Which was its main criticism to begin with.