🔐 SSL Certificate Monitoring with Dynatrace + Custom Automation for Management Zones
Dynatrace’s SSL Certificate Monitor extension is a powerful addition to any observability stack:
✅ Auto-discovers SSL certificates across OneAgent-installed hosts
✅ Monitors remote domains via ActiveGate
✅ Alerts proactively on certificates nearing expiration
✅ Offers granular filtering, metadata enrichment, and dashboard integration for full visibility
But as with any enterprise-scale implementation, real-world complexity brings real-world challenges…
🚧 Challenge: Bridging the Gap Between Discovery and Ownership
While Dynatrace does a great job discovering SSL certificates, we quickly realized a critical gap: The discovered certificates weren’t automatically mapped to their respective Management Zones.
This posed several problems:
Certificates lacked contextual ownership, making it hard to trace responsibility
Alerts were scattered and lacked relevance for specific teams
Dashboards couldn’t be scoped cleanly by zone, leading to cluttered views
Manual assignment was tedious, error-prone, and unsustainable at scale
Governance and compliance tracking became fragmented across environments
In a dynamic, multi-team setup, this lack of alignment between certificate data and zone-based visibility was a major operational bottleneck.
🛠️ Solution: Workflow-Driven Automation Using Smart Tagging
I took this challenge as an opportunity to build a scalable, automated solution that bridges the gap between certificate discovery and zone ownership.
Here’s what I implemented:
🔹 Metadata Extraction & Tagging
Designed a workflow to extract key metadata from each discovered certificate—such as domain name, environment (dev/stage/prod), application identifier, and business unit
Used this metadata to generate meaningful, structured tags that reflect real-world ownership and context
🔹 Dynamic Assignment to Management Zones
Leveraged Dynatrace’s tagging rules and workflow engine to automatically assign certificates to their respective Management Zones based on the generated tags
Ensured that new certificates are tagged and assigned in real-time as they’re discovered
Built logic to handle edge cases like shared certificates, wildcard domains, and multi-zone overlaps
🔹 Outcome: Operational Clarity & Governance
Teams now have clear visibility into the certificates they own
Alerts are scoped to relevant zones, reducing noise and improving response times
Dashboards are cleaner, more actionable, and aligned with team boundaries
Compliance tracking is streamlined with zone-based reporting
Simple way to understand 😉,
This automation not only solved the immediate challenge—it elevated our observability maturity and aligned certificate lifecycle management with our broader platform governance strategy.
🔹 Does It Stop Here? Not at All. This solution goes beyond just alerting—it adds real monitoring value. I designed a UX-centric dashboard that splits certificate visibility into three intuitive categories:
Expired Certificates
Certificates Approaching Expiry
Certificates with Sufficient Validity
This structure helps teams prioritize actions, reduce noise, and maintain proactive control over certificate lifecycles.
🔹 Outcome: Operational Clarity & Governance
Teams now have clear visibility into the certificates they own
Alerts are scoped to relevant zones, reducing noise and improving response times
Dashboards are cleaner, more actionable, and aligned with team boundaries
Compliance tracking is streamlined with zone-based reporting
Hope this gives the fullest capability can be used 🙂
💡 This is a great example of how platform engineering can extend vendor capabilities to meet enterprise needs—turning a limitation into an opportunity for innovation.
Post your message for the Workflow(s). Surely I can help 🙂
#Dynatrace #SSLMonitoring #Automation #DevOps #Observability #WorkflowAutomation
Keep flood your responses and feedbacks.
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