Domain & SSL Expiry Monitoring

An expired domain or certificate is the most preventable outage there is - and it keeps happening, because auto-renewal fails silently and the reminder email goes to an inbox nobody reads. AlertKick watches both expiry dates continuously and pages you weeks before the deadline, through the same alerting the rest of your monitoring uses.

Domain expiry monitoring

A domain-expiry monitor watches the registration's expiry date along with registrar and nameserver details, and alerts on the warning schedule you choose - 30 days out, 7 days out, whatever fits how your team works. Expired domains take down household-name services every year, because every layer of the default safety net fails silently: auto-renew hits a dead card, the registrar reminder lands in a former employee's inbox, and nothing else is watching. This is the something else. It also catches what expiry reminders never can: a nameserver change you didn't make.

SSL certificate monitoring

An SSL monitor reads the certificate your users actually receive - days to expiry and issuer - and alerts long before browser warnings start. The certificate that matters is the one being served, not the one that renewed: renewal automation breaks in quiet ways, like a renewed cert that never got reloaded into nginx, or a load balancer still holding last year's certificate. Checking the live endpoint catches all of them, and short-lived 90-day certificates make this more important, not less - renewal runs far more often, so there are far more chances for the pipeline to break.

Alerts that reach a human in time

Expiry warnings go through the same pipeline as every other AlertKick alert: delivered via email, Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp, SMS, and the mobile app, routed to whoever is on call, and escalated until someone acknowledges. A certificate expiring in three weeks is real work rather than a 3 AM page - so the warning arrives during working hours, with time to fix a broken renewal pipeline calmly.

Part of the same monitoring, not another tool

Domain and SSL monitors are two of the five monitor types in website & uptime monitoring - the same setup, dashboard, and escalation chains as your HTTP, TCP, and DNS checks, alongside the agent watching your servers from the inside. No separate certificate-tracking subscription to remember to renew.

What you get

Domain registration expiry tracking with registrar and nameserver details, live SSL certificate checks with days-to-expiry and issuer, warning thresholds on your own schedule, uptime history per monitor, and delivery through your escalation chains and on-call rotations. Included on every plan - the free plan's 10 monitors cover both types, with commercial use allowed.

Guides on this topic

Frequently asked questions

How does domain expiry monitoring work?
Add a domain-expiry monitor and AlertKick looks up the registration's expiry date, registrar, and nameservers on a schedule. You set the warning threshold - say 30 and 7 days out - and alerts go through the same channels and escalation chains as everything else: email, Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp, SMS, and the mobile app.
How does SSL certificate monitoring work?
An SSL monitor connects to your endpoint and reads the certificate a real browser would receive - days to expiry and issuer. Because it checks the certificate actually being served, it catches the classic failure where renewal ran but the service never reloaded.
Isn't auto-renewal enough?
Renewal automation fails silently: the renewer runs but the service never reloads, the cert renews on one host but not the load balancer, a registrar payment fails, or the expiry reminder goes to an inbox nobody reads. Monitoring the domain and certificate the public actually sees is the only check that catches every one of these.
Is this included in the free plan?
Yes. Domain-expiry and SSL monitors count toward the free plan’s 10 monitors, checked every 5 minutes with alerts to email, Slack, and Telegram - commercial use allowed, no card required.

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