It appears to be a path issue. The immediate cause of the failure is that one of the parent directories does not exist.  Exploring around the cgroup folder, I noticed that most services had created their own directories in /sys/fs/cgroup/system.slice, in that the separate cpu and memory directories do not exist, hence why the chown fails. So I just modified my splunk systemd service file from ExecStartPost=/bin/bash -c "chown -R splunk:splunk /sys/fs/cgroup/cpu/system.slice/%n" ExecStartPost=/bin/bash -c "chown -R splunk:splunk /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/system.slice/% to ExecStartPost=/bin/bash -c "chown -R splunk:splunk /sys/fs/cgroup/system.slice/%n" ExecStartPost=/bin/bash -c "chown -R splunk:splunk /sys/fs/cgroup/system.slice/% In my case, I was running splunk as splunk, not root, but the same occurred on a host where I was running the splunk processes as root as well. I had the same issue on some Fedora machines running the universal forwarder as well. ... View more