Having struggled with this for months on and off and I finally identified the problems I’ve been having with my Cpanel/Ubuntu install of Piwik.
The installation instructions do not cover the issues you’ll hit if your *nix distro is not inheriting folder permissions when it creates new cached templates in template_c as well as other tmp folders/files.
The solution is to use the setfacl command to set permission defaults for your specific tmp folder.
The symptoms were constant errors with the /tmp/templates_c folder for admin views. The caching system was trying to generate directories and files but because of the Ubuntu ACL system it was not inhereting the parent directory permissions and hitting errors.
The setfacl command helped set the perms so they could be inherited properly.
As for tests… Can’t suggest one, but adding it to the FAQ would definitely be useful.