questions about Monero pool setup

[F-XMR]

My buddy and I just setup a pool and are mining it at about 7 KH/sec.  I have some questions about what i see in the screen logs.  Everything appears to be working, but I suppose we wont know for sure, until we mine our first block, if we ever do.

Broadcasting to x visitors and 1 address lookups.
I see this often, but the x hardly ever matches the number of devices we have mining.  Each device is using the same Monero address, and the wallet setup on the pool is also setup with this address.

No block candidates in redis
what does this mean?  I can't seem to find much information on this.

Do i have to have the monero-wallet-rpc daemon started in order for the pool to send the reward after a block is mined?  I noticed this is specified on the how-to for the Electroneum pool, but i don't see any mention of it on the Monero pool guide.  I have payments disabled since we are using the same address for all miners.

In general, how do we know its working properly?  Other than the miners looking like they are doing their job, and no glaring issues on the pool, is there a test that can be ran to ensure things are functioning properly?

[wacko]

In general, how do we know its working properly?  Other than the miners looking like they are doing their job, and no glaring issues on the pool, is there a test that can be ran to ensure things are functioning properly?

Have you figured it out? I'm trying to do a similar thing and the only idea I've had so far was to run a similar pool (cryptonote) for a less popular coin just so that the network difficulty is not as high as it is for ETN or XMR. The pool setup should be almost identical, but you're a lot more likely to start finding blocks for something like SUMO or ITNS. And then, when you see that it's working as it should, switch the pool to the coin you want.