Summary

The issue with Catalina logs files not being generated or updated is normally related to how Jira is running in the environment. 

Environment

Unix Environments with Jira 7 or 8 installed with a Jira running as a foreground Linux service.

Diagnosis

1) If you running your instance on Docker, you might be facing this known BUG: 

 SCALE-45 -Catalina.out file is missing in $JIRA_INST/logs folder in dockerized Jira.

2) In case you are NOT using dockerized Jira, and it's is running as a service in the foreground, it also won't write in catalina.out logs.

You can check the script responsible for starting up JIRA in its location: /lib/systemd/system/jira.service.

It's fully described here: Run Jira as a systemd service on linux.

Cause

 if Jira is running as a service in the foreground (-fg), it won't write in catalina.out logs.

Because the catalina files have a stdout redirection. If it's running in the foreground, it won't stdout, so, we won't have a catalina.out file.

Solution

Check how Jira is being started in the file "/lib/systemd/system/jira.service".

If the customer is not using our supported script, or changed anything inside it, we must warn them we only support the following one:

[Unit] 
Description=Atlassian Jira
After=network.target

[Service] 
Type=forking
User=jira
LimitNOFILE=20000
PIDFile=/opt/atlassian/jira/work/catalina.pid
ExecStart=/opt/atlassian/jira/bin/start-jira.sh
ExecStop=/opt/atlassian/jira/bin/stop-jira.sh

[Install] 
WantedBy=multi-user.target ps -aux | grep "jira"

You can look for the parameter "-fg" at the end of the line for "ExecStart". If it's starting Jira in the foreground, catalina.out file won't be generated.

Like the below example:

ExecStart=/opt/atlassian/jira-software/current/bin/start-jira.sh -fg

After editing this file, remember to reload systemctl:

systemctl daemon-reload