Is Tomcat running?

On my linux system, I start Tomcat with the startup.sh script. To know whether it is running or not, i use

ps -ef | grep tomcat  

If the output result contains the whole path to my tomcat folder, then it is running

try this instead and because it needs root privileges use sudo

sudo service tomcat7 status

Why grep ps, when the pid has been written to the $CATALINA_PID file?

I have a cron'd checker script which sends out an email when tomcat is down:

kill -0 `cat $CATALINA_PID` > /dev/null 2>&1
if [ $? -gt 0 ]
then
    echo "Check tomcat" | mailx -s "Tomcat not running" [email protected]
fi

I guess you could also use wget to check the health of your tomcat. If you have a diagnostics page with user load etc, you could fetch it periodically and parse it to determine if anything is going wrong.

netstat -lnp | grep 8080 would probably be the best way, if you know Tomcat's listening port. If you want to be certain that is is functional, you will have to establish a connection and send an HTTP request and get a response. You can do this programatically, or using any web browser.