Monitor API Gateway Certificates for Microservices

For SREs and backend developers managing complex microservice architectures, an expired TLS certificate on an API gateway or internal service can trigger widespread outages. Proactively monitor all critical API endpoints to maintain system stability and prevent cascading failures.

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The problem

In a microservices environment, every service relies on secure communication, often fronted by API gateways. An expired SSL certificate on a critical gateway or an internal service endpoint can halt traffic, rendering multiple downstream services inaccessible. This creates a single point of failure that propagates rapidly, impacting user experience, third-party integrations, and internal operations. Debugging these outages is notoriously difficult due to the distributed nature of the system.

Consider a scenario where your authentication service's certificate expires. Suddenly, no user can log in, and all services requiring authentication fail. Such an event can quickly escalate into a major incident, requiring immediate firefighting from your SRE team. Without a centralized monitoring solution, identifying the root cause – a simple expired certificate – can waste precious hours, leading to significant reputational and financial damage.

How Certfly solves it

Centralize monitoring for all internal and external API endpoints and gateways in one dashboard.

Get early warnings for expiring certificates on critical services, preventing system-wide outages.

View issuer, SANs, and signing algorithm for each API cert to simplify troubleshooting.

Concrete example


$ curl -v https://api.your-microservice.com/health\n
*   Trying 192.0.2.1...\n
* Connected to api.your-microservice.com (192.0.2.1) port 443 (#0)\n
* ALPN: offers h2\n
* ALPN: offers http/1.1\n
*  CAfile: /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt\n
*  CApath: /etc/ssl/certs\n
* TLSv1.3 (OUT), TLS handshake, Client hello (1):\n
* TLSv1.3 (IN), TLS handshake, Server hello (2):\n
* TLSv1.3 (IN), TLS handshake, Encrypted Extensions (8):\n
* TLSv1.3 (IN), TLS handshake, Certificate (11):\n
*  subjectAltName: host "api.your-microservice.com" matched against "api.your-microservice.com"\n
*  SSL certificate verify ok.

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Watch your TLS certs so you don't have to.

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Frequently asked questions

Can Certfly monitor internal APIs not exposed to the public internet?

Certfly monitors publicly accessible endpoints. For internal APIs, you would typically expose a monitoring endpoint or use a proxy that Certfly can access, ensuring security while allowing certificate status checks.

How quickly does Certfly detect certificate issues?

Certfly probes your specified endpoints regularly, often multiple times a day. Any change in status or an approaching expiration date triggers an alert almost immediately, providing real-time awareness.

Does Certfly support certificates from all CAs?

Yes, Certfly is designed to monitor SSL/TLS certificates from any Certificate Authority, including Let's Encrypt, commercial CAs, and even self-signed certificates (with appropriate configuration for trust).