Module 4: Process & Service Management

Process and service management sits at the heart of Linux system administration. You must understand how the system executes programs, manages resources, and provides services to users. This module begins with fundamental process concepts and teaches you how Linux creates, manages, and terminates processes, covering process hierarchies, parent-child relationships, and process states.

The practical process management section teaches you to monitor system activity using tools like ps, top, and htop. You’ll learn to identify resource-intensive processes, understand process priorities, and manage running processes through signals and job control. These skills prove essential for maintaining system performance and responding to issues in production environments.

systemd service management forms a major component as modern Linux distributions rely heavily on systemd for service orchestration. You’ll master systemctl commands for starting, stopping, and managing services while learning service dependencies and system targets. The module covers both managing existing services and creating custom service units.

Job scheduling receives coverage through both traditional cron and modern systemd timers. You’ll learn to automate routine tasks and implement maintenance schedules using crontab syntax, systemd timer units, and calendar expressions. You’ll understand when to choose each approach based on dependencies and integration requirements.

Performance monitoring ties together the module’s concepts by teaching you to analyze CPU, memory, disk, and network utilization. You’ll learn to identify bottlenecks, interpret load averages, and use analysis tools like sar, iostat, and vmstat. The workshop emphasizes creating monitoring strategies and diagnosing performance issues in various scenarios for proactive system management.


Table of contents