Linux Administration Cookbook

Checking if NTP is running

First, a basic check is to confirm the date is what you expect it to be, with the date command:

$ dateMon 13 Aug 10:05:31 UTC 2018

Note that the preceding date information is set to universal time coordinated (UTC). This is increasingly being used as distributed computing takes hold. Servers don't have to be locked to one geographical region, and if you've got a thousand boxes over multiple geographical locations, you might choose to unify their time and manage specific differences in other software instead (such as a web app being responsible for writing the timestamp for the location its user is located at, for example).

To check whether chronyd itself is running, use systemctl:

$ systemctl status chronyd● chronyd.service ...