Most important parts of systemd for sys admins to know and understand
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You're going to get a lot of varied answers depending on the slant of each responder. I'd first recommend you just perform a general web search using the terms "systemd overview" and read some of the hits.
The way I'm learning systemd is by being stuck using it. Places where I have to go "What's this stupid jounalctl, or netctl?!?"
Each of those are top level systemd controls which administer the journal (logs) or the network services. There are things like enable and disable of services, and there are services which are usually scripts with links that are made to them (enable), versus not (disable) and descriptor files which configure how any given service is supposed to be run, what it depends on, when it should be attempted to run, and how persistent it should be if it happens to be stopped or fails at some point.
Learn by doing, but review some of the information on it so you don't just enter into things blindly.
@rtmistler: AFAIK, netctl is not a systemd tool, but an Arch Linux specific tool to manage network profiles.
@sigint-ninja: Start here: http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/
On a "normal" desktop machine you will mostly use systemctl and journalctl, but timedatectl and hostnamectl may also be useful. If you work with containers and virtual machines you might want to look at machinectl also. Any of these tools (and their respective configuration and unit file formats) comes with extensive man-pages. The Arch Wiki also provides a whole bunch of information about configuring your system with system and using its tools.
I won't write a tutorial here, but if you have any specific questions after reading the Wiki articles/man-pages I will be happy to answer them here, if I can.
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