super confused: how to accurately check cPanel service status after WHM restart failures, noob here

hi everyone, i'm really new to managing a vps and recently had some whm service restart issues, the ones where it says it failed but sometimes things still work? it's super confusing for a beginner like me. my main pain point now is i don't trust the cPanel service status reports in whm. after a failed restart attempt, sometimes it says a service is down, but my website or email seems to work. other times it says it's up, but users report issues. i just don't know how to properly verify if a service is actually running and healthy. i've tried restarting services multiple times from the 'service manager' in whm, also checked 'server status' -> 'service status'. i even logged into ssh and ran 'top' or 'ps aux | grep service_name' but i'm not sure what i'm looking for specifically. sometimes the process shows up but it's not responding correctly. it's really frustrating trying to figure out the actual cPanel service status when the dashboard itself seems unreliable. what's the most reliable way for a complete noob to verify cPanel service status after whm restart failures? are there specific logs i should be checking, or commands that give a definitive 'yes, it's working' answer? what are the common mistakes beginners make when trying to diagnose these sorts of service issues?