The UX is clunky. Users have to hand-type the URL pattern. There are no queries for customization.
And still, more than 500 domains were added over the course of a few days. About half of them are monitored frequently
via RSS.
I got a lot of constructive feedback and friendly comments on Hacker News and Lobsters.
This showed me again what a great community we have in software development.
On a side note, I think the well known monitoring solutions are often too big for what self-hosters need.
I imagine that’s why the RSS monitoring solution is so appealing to many. It solves a problem that self-hosters have
without requiring the big monitoring and alerting solutions.
There’s probably much to explore in the space of monitoring, alerting and self-hosting.
The expiration of TLS certificates is usually monitored with established monitoring solutions.
Sometimes monitoring happens via services that send e-mails when the expiration date comes closer.
Often times, these services require a sign-up.
I created an entirely free service that monitors the expiry of TLS certificates via RSS without any sign-up.
How it works
With your RSS Feed Reader of choice, you subscribe to
https://scrutineer.tech/monitor/cert/{domain}.rss
Example for scrutineer.tech: https://scrutineer.tech/monitor/cert/scrutineer.tech.rss
Some background info
This is a free service without sign-up
Notifications are generated 30 days, 7 days and 1 day in advance
No guarantees are given, for nothing 🙃
There are no checks for the trustworthiness of certificates. Only the “Not After” field is checked
Which means self-signed certificates work
How it looks
Coming up
I have more plans for monitoring TLS certificates based on certificate transparency logs.
You can subscribe to this blog via RSS as well to be notified when it is ready.
