Different services and apps have different ideas of what is worth logging, and you may not agree with what they consider worthy of logging. Some apps and services are especially chatty in logs and you may want to silence them completely.

Here are three methods for either adjusting or silencing overly chatty apps and services.

The systemd journal has only limited storage filtering capabilities, and defaults to store everything in case it might be useful. However, sometimes you just want to silence a desktop app or a service unit entirely or at least adjust their logging verbosity.

Adjust logging level of systemd service You can set a minimum logging level based on the standard syslog levels of individual systemd service units. This method works in systemd version 236 and later, but only works for programs that send logs directly to journald or syslog, or output to stdout in syslog format. Create a service unit override by editing the systemd service you want to modify by running the following command: systemctl edit example.service This opens a text editor where you need to add a LogLevelMax value. Below is an example override that restricts logging to level 3 (errors) and higher. [Service] LogLevelMax=3 For reference, the standard log levels are emergency (0), alert (1), critical (2), error (3), warning (4), notice (5), info (6), and debug (6). Setting a lower number excludes the higher and less important log messages from your journal. Install the service override and restart the service by executing the following commands: systemctl daemon-reload systemctl restart example.service The service will no longer log messages with a logging level higher than the maximum level you configured.

Silencing a service’s standard output By default, systemd will forward every standard output (stdout) and error (stderr) message to the journal. Some programs aren’t designed for this behavior and can be too chatty, especially on standard output. You can override this behavior and discard the program’s output instead. Here’s how to modify a systemd unit file to discard program output. Create a service unit override by editing the systemd service you want to modify by running the following command: systemctl edit example.service This opens a text editor where you can direct the output forwarding to null instead of the journal. [Service] StandardOutput=null #StandardError=null Install the service override and restart the service by executing the following commands: systemctl daemon-reload systemctl restart example.service The service will no longer forward standard output messages toi the journal.