Don’t let your certificate expirations catch you offguard

Microsoft’s recent slipup with a certificate that caused outages for the Azure service is a reminder for the rest of us to make sure we are keeping a close eye on certificate expirations. Having a certificate expire on you makes you company look really inept, but in practice keeping track of certificates and when they expire can be a pain if you are trying to do it manually. A system that monitors certificates and reminds you before they will expire can be an excellent way to avoid having this happen to you, and is much easier than tracking them in a spreadsheet or sticky notes.

NodePing provides a few different ways to keep ahead of certificate expirations. For web servers, we have an SSL Check specifically designed to check the validity of SSL certificates and warn you a set number of days before they expire. You can set the number of days to anything that is useful for you. We typically suggest a couple of weeks in advance of the expiration.

Certificate expirations can also hit other types of services as well. Our email checks (SMTP, POP, and IMAP) can verify the SSL/TLS certificates used by each of these servers. Similar to the SSL check for web services, these checks verify that the SSL certificate is valid and working, and also can be set to warn you a certain number of days before they expire.

Tracking your certificates can be a pain, but it doesn’t have to be. Using an automated monitoring system like NodePing for SSL Certificate monitoring can make the task easy and painless, and let you focus on more interesting things.