Blog
Insights, guides, and best practices for SSL certificate management
Most SSL monitoring tools only check port 443. But the same expirations and chain breaks hit mail servers, FTP gateways, and LDAP directories — and when those certs fail, the symptoms look nothing like a browser warning. Here's how TLS works for each protocol, the STARTTLS trap that catches teams out, and why monitoring needs to speak each protocol natively.
CDN architectures have two SSL certificates — edge and origin — but most monitoring only checks the edge. That gap hides three common failure modes: cached content masking an expired origin cert, silent auto-renewal failures, and broken origin handshakes that don't surface until cache hit rate drops. This post covers each failure mode, walks through a real CloudFront outage caused by exactly this, and shows what to monitor on CloudFlare, Fastly, CloudFront, and Akamai to catch it.
Most SSL monitoring tools can only check public websites — but modern systems rely heavily on private networks, internal APIs, and restricted environments. This creates a major visibility gap. In this article, we explain how SSL monitoring agents work, why they're essential for complete coverage, and how they help you monitor certificates across both public and private infrastructure.
Managing SSL certificates across multiple environments — development, staging, and production — is a common but often overlooked challenge. While production certificates usually get the most attention, expired or misconfigured certificates in non-production environments can delay releases, break integrations, and create unexpected outages. This guide explains why SSL monitoring must extend beyond production, highlights common pitfalls, and outlines best practices for achieving full visibility across all environments.
2026 marks a pivotal year for SSL/TLS. Certificate lifespans are shrinking dramatically, validation requirements are tightening, and post-quantum cryptography is finally arriving in production environments. This post covers the three major transformations every developer and IT leader needs to understand.
"SSL certificate not trusted" errors occur when clients can't verify a certificate's trust chain. Common causes include missing intermediate certificates, hostname mismatches, outdated client trust stores, or certificates that weren’t properly deployed. Fixing the issue requires validating the full certificate chain in production and monitoring SSL behavior before users are impacted.
Automating SSL renewal prevents certificates from expiring, but it doesn't guarantee they're correctly deployed or working in production. SSL monitoring validates real-world behavior — catching broken chains, misconfigurations, and deployment issues before they cause outages. To stay online, modern teams need both renewal and monitoring.