How to Monitor VMware SSL Certificates Expiration and Get Timely Alerts

Monitoring VMware SSL certificates expiration and getting timely alerts is essential for maintaining secure and optimized IT infrastructure. Doing so ensures that your organization remains compliant with security regulations, while also avoiding any downtime.

By monitoring VMware SSL certificates expiration, you can quickly identify when certificates are expiring and have time to renew or replace them before they become invalid. This guide will discuss the steps you need to take in order to monitor VMware SSL certificates expiration and get timely alerts so that you can keep your IT infrastructure secure and running smoothly.

Why is it important to monitor VMware SSL certificates expiration?

VMware SSL certificates expiration is important because certificate expiration can cause your VMware environment to become unresponsive or external services or automation to break. VMware environments rely on SSL to function securely and seamlessly. When an SSL certificate expires, your environment will become unreliable. If you don’t have a monitoring system in place to identify an expired certificate, you run the risk of disruption to your organization.

Even though you may have a valid certificate, it’s possible that it was issued with an incorrect name or domain name. If this is the case, it will cause your security certificate to become invalid. This can happen if you make a mistake when ordering the certificate or the organization you’re working with makes a mistake.

In either case, the expiration of your certificate may go unnoticed until the certificate becomes invalid and your VMware environment stops functioning. In some cases you won’t be able to access the virtual machines or certain services. 

How to monitor VMware SSL certificates expiration

You can monitor VMware SSL certificates expiration in two ways - manually or automatically. When monitoring certificates manually, you check the expiration date of each certificate and then track your progress towards renewing or replacing them. A very cumbersome and error-prone process.

With automatic monitoring, you set up a system to regularly check the expiration dates of each certificate.

When a certificate expires, you receive an alert letting you know that it’s time to renew or replace it. Manually monitoring VMware SSL certificates expiration - To manually monitor VMware SSL certificates expiration, you’ll need to log into the vCenter server and select "Assign Services to Certificates" from the vCenter's "Manage" drop-down menu.

Then, you can check the expiration date of each certificate and mark certificates that have less than 90 days until expiration with a red flag.

Automatically monitoring VMware SSL certificates and any other SSL certificates expiration can be done using Opvizor. This way, you have time to renew or replace certificates before they become invalid, keeping your VMware environment secure and running smoothly.

Benefits of monitoring VMware SSL certificates expiration

Benefits of monitoring VMware SSL certificates expiration include: Improved compliance - By monitoring VMware SSL certificates expiration, you can stay compliant with security regulations by identifying and addressing expired certificates before they become invalid. Avoidance of downtime - If your certificates expire before you notice and have time to renew or replace them, you risk your VMware environment becoming unresponsive.

And its very easy to set up automatic monitoring and alerting using Opvizor.

For example, you may want an alert to be sent to you 15 days before a certificate is set to expire, letting you know that it’s time to renew or replace it.

Conclusion

Monitoring VMware SSL certificates expiration is an important step in securing your VMware environment. You can monitor certificates manually or automatically to ensure that certificates don’t expire before you have time to renew or replace them.

When certificates expire, you can set up alerts to notify you when they’re due to expire so that you have time to take action. Monitoring certificates can also help you stay compliant with security regulations and avoid downtime and fines.

While this Opvizor feature is described for VMware in this blog post, it can be used for any SSL certificate check.