[growse]

Sure there is. It's just software. All the regular tools work just fine.

I've happily been using grep, strace, etc to debug issues in both systemd and 'traditional Unix' systems for years.

[makomk]

PID 1 is not quite the same as other processes. Historically it wasn't even possible to use gdb or strace on it without patching the kernel, though I think this changed at some point. Any crash in it still causes a kernel panic that brings down the system though.