So I’ve come across this problem quite a few times. Normal way to do this is:

ps -ef | grep tomcat

This works most of the times. If tomcat is running, it gives between 1 and 2 lines back but if not, it gives anywhere between 0 and 1 lines back. A much cleaner use of the above command would be with wc -l:

ps -ef | grep tomcat | wc -l

However, this doesn’t solve the actual problem as along with the tomcat process, it also gives you the process of command "grep tomcat".
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