How we eliminated service outages from ‘certificate expired’ by setting up alerts with Grafana and Prometheus

Grafana Labs, collaborating with OpenAdvice, presents a solution to prevent service outages caused by expired certificates by utilizing Grafana and Prometheus for monitoring. The approach involves using a blackbox exporter to scrape SSL certificate data from various HTTPS endpoints, capturing expiry dates, and visualizing this information in a new table panel in Grafana 7. This setup allows users to monitor certificate expiration and related connection metrics efficiently. Alerts can be configured in Prometheus to notify administrators when certificates are nearing expiration, ensuring proactive management and avoiding service disruptions. The method emphasizes simplicity, requiring minimal coding, and offers flexibility to scale by adding more targets as services grow.