[iforgotpassword]

Yeah, the rest just shows that op likes to do things like they've always done it. How you can prefer to poke around syslog and ps output to determine the state of a service instead if just doing systemctl status is beyond me for example.

[axy]

Because systemctl status is called by monitoring tool. It's a habit, yes. If monitoring shows the service is down, no point to manually use systemctl, and syslog with ps become best friends. And sometimes date command as well. PIs don't have hardware clocks and wrong date may lead to errors that look mysterious.

[djbusby]

That (syslog,ps) method was likely formed by habit during the many years before systemctl existed.