I don't agree about logging. I think the systemd journal is a great improvment over legacy style old text dumps. Stuff like "journalctl -b -p err" (show only messages from this boot at log level "error"). So useful, so simple. Or "journalctl --since -15m" that shows the last 15 minutes of logging. Or "journalctl -f -u firewalld.service" that just tails the firewall service. There is bash completion of everything, from parameters to servicenames. There is kernel guarantee the entries aren't faked (all those field starting with underscore), meaning that if cups is writing "lpt0 on fire" in the journal, you can see if its a fake or real. (on syslog anything can pretend to be cups).
systemd is also able to gain logging info from when the system is only in the "initramfs" stage (systemd lives in initramfs during boot and then jumps to rootfs), before the root system is even mounted, something rsyslog can only dream of.
The journal is primarily an append only system (basically a text file with another newline separator + index), so it is quite robust against RW corruptions.
systemd's primary design goal is simplicity; it isn't a log sink like rsyslog, and won't have db drivers. It is however easy to export its content in e.g. JSON format by the journald-gateway, or let rsyslog, who can natively read journal files, convert it into any supported format etc. So using Splunk is trivial these days.
Monit and systemd aren't completely overlapping, so you can still run Monit on top of systemd, that way systemd can restart Monit if it fails :-). But it is a major selling point for systemd, that it comes with integrated service supervision "out-of-the-box" and in easy way too. Just add some keywords to a textfile, and away you go. Because systemd uses cgroups, it can track all processes and their child processes with ease, so its supervision abilities are quite awesome.
To simplify both projects; systemd has the technological superiority when it comes to the low level supervision stuff, while Monit has all the high level monitoring stuff, like graphs etc.
OS containers predates systemd deployment. But systemd intend to make them much better: systemd intend to make OS containers that runs unmodified on top of the host OS. As it is now, there isn't much security, but that is the next round: unmodified, secure OS containers; run a standard Ubuntu and a standard Fedora on top of CentOS (and make them socket activated too). Nobody else have such high ambitions.
Regarding RH. They hardly need to make themselves "relevant" since their revenue actually keeps on growing despite the international crisis. Not many other Linux distro vendors experience that. No slant intended against Canonical, but AFAIK they still loose money every year.
Besides, while Lennart Poettering is employed by RH, systemd have long been a multi-distro collaboration, with half a dozen developers from different distros and companies that have git commit access. There has been more than 600 independent contributors too. So it is a huge open source project, not a Red Hat solo show.
