posting a reply to this old thread so anyone running across this in the future has some breadcrumbs to follow
I think what you were running into is a change which was made in Jira 8 where logs don’t show up in stdout like they did in Jira 7. See this thread, this comment in particular. I’m still trying to figure out the minimum log4j.properties that you need to get the Jira 7 behavior, but until then you can tail -f $JIRA_HOME_DIR/log/atlassian-jira.log.