It is hard for us to guess what went wrong.
You need an electrum server running to be able to connect to it with electrum.
If you only want to verify whether you have received the transaction yourself, but don't explicitly want to have the luxury of simply opening electrum, i'd suggest to simply run the core CLI and enter:
gettransaction TRANSACTION_ID
You will get all necessary information about the transaction id (sender/receiver/confirmations/..).
This takes less work and configuration than setting up an electrum server, but isn't that convenient for daily usage.