Warden Warden

Know when your SSL/TLS certificates will fail- before users do.

Warden monitors SSL/TLS certificates, endpoints, and domains to detect renewals, misconfigurations, and outages- then alert you before production breaks.

Automated peace of mind

What Warden actually catches

⏰

Expiration tracking

Reads the expiration date from the certificate your endpoint is actually serving, then sends reminders at 30, 7, 3, and 1 days remaining.

🔄

Certificate changes

Compares certificate fingerprints over time to catch renewals, unexpected replacements, and “wrong cert on the edge” deployments.

🏷️

Hostname validation

Validates the requested hostname against the certificate’s SAN/CN the way strict clients do — including SNI routing and wildcard edge cases.

🔗

Chain validation

Flags missing intermediates and obvious chain breaks so you don’t ship a cert that “works in some browsers” but fails in API clients.

🤝

TLS handshake

Runs a real TLS handshake (with timeouts) and reports handshake failures separately from certificate problems.

⚠️

Connection failures

Separates DNS failures from TCP issues (timeouts/refused) so you can tell whether it’s a record change, firewall, or origin outage.

Things that break even when auto-renew is enabled

Why SSL certificates fail even when auto-renew is on

Auto-renew usually means a new certificate was issued — not that it’s installed and serving in production. Common failures include: DNS/HTTP validation timeouts after a DNS or provider change, load balancers and CDNs still serving the old cert, deployment steps failing, or permission/path issues that prevent renewed files from being read. Warden checks the certificate your users actually receive.

Why the wrong certificate breaks APIs but not browsers

Browsers show a warning and humans sometimes click through (or they test on a different hostname), but API clients and mobile apps fail hard on hostname and chain validation errors. Example: you deploy *.app.example.com, but your API is api.example.com (not covered by that wildcard). Warden validates hostname matching the way strict clients do.

Certificate expired but site still loads in browser — why?

If a certificate is expired, new HTTPS requests should fail — but you can still see something if the browser is showing a cached page, a service worker offline copy, or previously loaded assets. Meanwhile APIs and fresh loads break. Warden tests the live TLS handshake to the endpoint, not cached content.

How Warden fits in

1

Add your endpoints

Tell Warden which domains and ports to monitor

2

Automated checks

Warden checks certificates every 15 minutes automatically

3

Instant alerts

Get notified when certificates expire, change, or fail validation

4

Fix before users notice

Resolve issues before they impact production

Don't learn about certificate failures from your users.