Why is Service Status showing all services as pending?

Question

Why is WHM / Service Status showing all my services as pending?

Answer

The tailwatchd logs at /usr/local/cpanel/logs/tailwatchd_log and /var/log/chkservd.log will provide details as to why it's unable to verify if your server's services are up. The most common cause for all services reporting as pending is that tailwatchd is waiting for the server to finish booting. You may see entries like the following.

CONFIG_TEXT: [210153] [2020-11-07 00:38:27 -0400] [Cpanel::TailWatch] [INFO] Waiting for server to finish booting.

CONFIG_TEXT: [2026-11-07 05:27:00 +0200] The system has recently booted.  Chkservd is deferring service checks until system uptime exceeds one service check interval.

This can be caused by your server's runlevel not being set to 3 yet, as it has not finished booting. You can verify what your server's runlevel is by running the runlevel command. The expected output is shown below.

# runlevel
N 3

If the above-provided runlevel command reports as unknown, you will want to reboot your server to the correct runlevel to resolve the issue. The following support article should also be helpful:

How do I change my server's runlevel?

Additional Resources

Tailwatch