Tomcat's logs are stored in $CATALINA_HOME/logs. User's logs (using java.util.logging.Logger) are stored in catalina.<date>.log every day.

Tomcat should be configured so maven tomcat7 plugin can have access to tomcat-manager and deploy .war file.

To do this, $CATALINA_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml should be edited. A simple solution is creating a user with default plugin's username and password. To do this, below lines should be added to the config file, in <tomcat-users>.

<role rolename="manager-script"/>
<user username="admin" password="" roles="manager-script"/>

See Apache Tomcat Maven Plugin's documentations for more details.

It may be necessary to set $CATALINA_HOME and $CATALINA_BASE manually. In a OS X machine with tomcat installed using brew, both environmental variables could be set to $(readlink -f $(dirname $(readlink -f `which catalina`))/..).