i'm playing a bit with the java.util.logging.MemoryHandler in test-db and it seems to work nicely.
it will store the logs in memory in a circular buffer overwriting the oldest entries first.
whenever a log is issued in category severe (==error) then the last 500 log entries are flushed to the console.
that way you can have quite detailed logging when something goes wrong and no logging then things go ok.
seems to work nice. i'll work with it some more before i roll it out over the full project.
