SSL Certificate Monitoring
Expired certificates take sites down instantly and usually on a Friday. Get warned weeks ahead.
An expired SSL certificate breaks a site for every visitor immediately - browsers block the page outright. Kawze's SSL monitoring checks your certificate's expiry date, issuer, and chain validity on a regular schedule and alerts you with enough lead time to renew before it becomes an outage.
How it works
- Add a domain monitor for the hostname you want to watch.
- Kawze inspects the live TLS certificate: expiry date, issuer, and whether the chain validates correctly.
- Checks run on a fixed schedule so a slipped renewal or a misconfigured cert gets caught early.
- Alerts fire ahead of expiry, and again if the certificate is already invalid, revoked, or serving the wrong chain.
Why it matters
- Advance warning before expiry, not a same-day scramble.
- Flags invalid certificate chains and issuer changes that can indicate a misconfiguration or a botched renewal.
- Runs alongside DNS checks on the same domain monitor, no extra setup.
Frequently asked questions
How far in advance does Kawze warn about SSL expiry?
Domain monitors check certificate expiry on a regular schedule and alert with enough lead time to renew before it lapses, rather than waiting until the day it fails.
Does SSL monitoring check the whole certificate chain?
Yes - Kawze checks that the chain validates, not just the leaf certificate expiry date, so an incomplete intermediate chain gets flagged too.
What happens if my SSL certificate has already expired?
Kawze flags the certificate as invalid on the next check and alerts you immediately, alongside the incident timeline showing exactly when the certificate stopped validating.
Does SSL monitoring work with wildcard certificates?
Yes - Kawze inspects whatever certificate the server presents for the hostname you add, wildcard or single-domain, and reports its expiry, issuer, and chain validity the same way.
This capability lives on Kawze's domain monitor - see that page for the full feature list and pricing for that uptime monitor type.