Here goes a post as a reminder for myself and for others that may have the same issues as I do.

I needed to add the spring-instrument-tomcat.jar to my tomcat so I could use LTW on a spring app I am developing, after hours thinking why adding the jar to /usr/share/tomcat-7/lib was not enough I ended up finding /usr/share/tomcat-7/package.env, there I found a CLASSPATH definition that contained the jars that were loaded by tomcat, adding it to the end solved my problems.

So there it is a short but hopefully useful post 🙂