I haven't been paying attention to my miner, but its been running and online the whole time but payouts disappeared between apr 9 and apr 25. Any idea what happened?
Well it obviously lost connection to kano.is and since you weren't paying attention it's been mining to a fail-over or not mining at all. If it were submitting shares here you'd of been paid. If you weren't paying attention whether it was mining or not how can you know it's been "running and online the whole time"? Maybe you ought to pay attention.
I have a thing called a business to run, mining is far from a fulltime gig I just have one antminer I picked up to see if it was worth investing more heavily into. Was just looking for input on what to look out for in the future, or how to better monitor it maybe? If the antminer has connectivity loss it is quite audible about it, so I thought its fine as long as it is humming (roaring? louder than our server rack) away in the warehouse. It didn't make a peep until we took the network down for maintenance yesterday.
I'm echoing Kano on a couple of things here, but occasionally a newer miner needs info, and a quick reply from us is generally easier than trying to scan 700 pages of dialogue...
Anyway, there are things to do that help. (1) Change the password on your miner (CRITICAL), (2) do what a couple of others have suggested re Zach Monroe's site and its functions for "miner down" alerts, and (3) perhaps consider that mining, even with one machine, does require a little more attention that just letting it run and checking it every couple of weeks. The alert beeper on the machine is not to be completely trusted.
I run 9 machines in my home, and although I'm retired I do have a lot of commitments that demand my (full-time) attention outside of mining, I try to, at least every few hours, find the time to (1) go to the kano.is site and check my workers' status, and (2) make a quick check of board temps in the machines. One cannot determine profitability on a machine without it having run 24/7 for a week or more without interruption (due to 5Nd).
Another thought...if you're running this on your biz network, pay particular attention to how it's configured. I've got a fairly extensive network configuration here (15 drops...don't ask how I do that in a one-bedroom flat), and find that both the S3s and the S7s could lose their connection, or (I dunno how) somehow become incommunicado, without beeping when they're supposed to. I ended up changing the fixed IP setup to DHCP (the BiteMe default is 99), and then reserving the IP addresses for the machines so they always get the same one regardless. As I said, I don't know why, but that solved those issues for me in the beginning. My R6700 router seems happier, and I haven't lost connection for any unknown reason since Feb.
Best to you.