Certificate Monitoring Implementation Checklist
Overview
Checklist for setting up comprehensive certificate monitoring — Prometheus exporters, Grafana dashboards, AlertManager rules, and coverage verification across all environments.
Table of Contents
- Monitoring Stack Prerequisites
- Exporter Deployment
- Grafana Dashboard Setup
- AlertManager Rule Configuration
- Coverage Verification
- Runbook Integration
Overview
Certificate expiry remains one of the most common causes of unplanned outages — and one of the most preventable. The challenge isn’t awareness; it’s coverage. Most teams monitor their primary web certificates but miss internal services, mutual TLS endpoints, code signing certs, and certificates embedded in Java keystores or Docker images.
This checklist provides a systematic approach to deploying certificate monitoring that actually covers your full environment. Each step is designed to be completed in order, building from exporter deployment through alerting rules to coverage verification. By the end, you’ll have confidence that no certificate can expire without your team knowing at least 30 days in advance.
Designed for teams already running Prometheus and Grafana, but adaptable to other monitoring stacks.
What’s Included
- Prometheus exporter selection and deployment steps for each certificate type
- Grafana dashboard JSON templates for certificate expiry visualization
- AlertManager rule configurations with escalation tiers (30-day, 14-day, 7-day, 1-day)
- Coverage audit procedure to identify unmonitored certificates across all environments
- Integration steps for PagerDuty, Slack, and email notification channels
- Verification tests to confirm alerts fire correctly before you need them