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.