I really appreciate the timeliness of all the responses and the theory behind how and when logging is configured and initialized has been explained really well.
However I'm not so sure I have explained where I actually am very well. I have been able to configure Java logging via the command line and within the app I wrote which utilizes embedded Tomcat and get desired output. The output I am not getting is from the either of the two web applications (which are registered wars). The part I am not following is if I am getting output from the logging (which utilizes java.util.logging ) in the application itself and the hosted web applications are also using java.util.logging, why am I not getting output from these? If the configuration is ignored because the JVM has already been initialized, I would think the configuration set via the Java Control Panel would be utilized. I suspect there's something simple I am not doing when I register these apps. > All the above is correct. See the API doc for > java.util.logging.LogManager . The static initializer for that class > uses either an instanced of itself or an instance of the class named on > the aforementioned system property. Thus, you need to set > java.util.logging.manager prior to initializing the JVM. >
