How I’m Solving the SSL Certificate Expiration Headache for DevOps and Security Teams
When I was working as a DevOps Engineer, SRE, or SysAdmin, both for other companies and my own projects, managing SSL certificate expiration was always a challenge. It's something so simple, yet it often doesn’t get the attention it deserves—and it can become painful quickly. (Raise your hand if you've ever let a certificate expire!)
Many times, I found myself writing scripts to collect certificate info, integrating them with Zabbix or other external tools. However, those tools only monitor online certificates, leaving internal ones untracked. And as for more comprehensive tools like Datadog or SolarWinds, you practically need to sell an organ to afford them.
Certificate expiration isn’t just a small issue—it's affected even the biggest companies, including Microsoft, Spotify, Cisco, Google Voice, and Equifax, leading to:
- Network outages
- Loss of customer trust
- Brand damage
- Poor user experience
- Increased exposure to vulnerabilities
These issues can result in millions in lost revenue.
That’s why I’m building SSL Guardian, a centralized monitoring platform for your SSL/TLS certificates across diverse technologies and environments. With Keymon, our soon-to-be-released open-source agent, we’ll cover everything—including internal certificates. Plus, you’ll have flexible alerting options, from simple integrations like Telegram Messenger, Slack, and Microsoft Teams, to more robust solutions like PagerDuty, hashtag#OpsGenie, and VictorOps.
I'd love to connect with you to learn how you're currently handling certificate monitoring and how we can build a tool that brings value to you and your team.
