This might be a dumb question but isn't what you're looking for simply... journalctl --no-pager -f | grep blah blah etc ? I'm genuinely curious about your response. I've recently installed ArchLinux ARM on a small server and it uses SystemD (my first experience with it) so far, it's been different, but I havn't found anything that I can't get working in it. I'm not carrying a torch for either the for or against camp here; here's what I've learned setting up my first SystemD server so far.
On the face of it, SystemD works OK, it does what it promises and for my limited use cases it is fine
I found it unintuitive for an admin used to using System V init
I read more about it and the authors claim that they provide many small programs that each do one thing well, they however have improved the integration between these, they seem to have admirable goals, I'm not convinced one way or the other about their implementations. What can I say, nothing has crashed so far for me, but I'm not sure I like the idea of one team trying to supplant quite so many binaries with their own versions.
I'm not sure I notice a whole hell of a lot of difference for my headless server, except the new network card naming stumped me at first. It boots, it runs and it does what it is supposed to. As for "EVERYTHING" being loaded into PID 1 this does not seem to be the case on my machine, I see different processes for the different apps that came with SystemD only the /sbin/init process is on PID 1, things like journal and dbus and logind are all running on other processes.
Personally, while I understand the concerns many have when others mess with our beloved Linux, I don't have any evidence from my own experience that things are in any way more bloated or insecure as is being claimed here. What I do know is that most distros are providing support for SystemD and a lot seem to be using it as the default now or in their next version. It looks like I'll have to learn it one way or the other so it may as well be now.
I remain confident that if in time we (the Linux community) find out that SystemD is utter crap for whatever reason, then we'll either improve it, rewrite it or move to something else entirely, such is the way of open source.