Monitors are how InfraNest keeps an eye on your servers, sites, and services — this article explains the different kinds of checks you can run and how to make sense of SSL warnings.
Overview
- InfraNest supports ten monitor types, each suited to a different kind of check.
- Pick the type that matches what you actually want to watch, rather than defaulting to one type for everything.
- Some types do more than just check status — for example, an SSL monitor also adds the certificate to your certificate list.
Choose the right monitor type
- HTTP — confirms a website or URL is reachable and healthy, and can detect slow responses.
- API — checks that a JSON or multi-step API endpoint behaves as expected.
- Port (TCP) — checks that a TCP port is open and accepting connections.
- SSL — checks that a certificate is valid and not near expiry, and adds it to your certificate list.
- DNS — checks that a DNS record resolves, optionally matching an expected value.
- Keyword — checks that a page contains (or doesn't contain) some expected text.
- Redirect — checks that a URL redirects to the address you expect.
- Ping (ICMP) — checks that a host answers a ping.
- Heartbeat — a "dead man's switch" for cron jobs; your job must check in each interval or you're alerted.
- Third-party — mirrors another company's public status page, so their outages show up on yours.
TipFor an HTTP check you can also turn on an SSL sub-check to watch the certificate's expiry, without creating a separate SSL monitor.
Understand SSL monitor warnings
- Open your SSL monitor and find the Warn when expiring within (days) setting — this is how many days before expiry you want to be warned, with 30 as a sensible default.
- Know that a certificate expiring soon does not turn the monitor red. The certificate still works, so the monitor stays up and no incident opens — you're just notified by email or your chosen destination, with details on the monitor's detail page. Only an actually expired certificate counts as an outage. This matters if the monitor is a component on a public status page, since an upcoming renewal isn't something your customers need to see as a problem.
- Note that self-renewing certificates are judged differently. Most certificates today (for example, from Let's Encrypt or similar services) are issued for 90 days and renew automatically with 30 days remaining — so a healthy certificate would otherwise trigger a warning on every renewal.
- For these, InfraNest watches the renewal instead of the expiry date, and alerts you only if the renewal should have happened and didn't — leaving you around 25 days to fix it.
- Check whether a certificate is treated this way on the monitor's detail page, under Renewal.
- If it's set up incorrectly, correct it on the certificate itself in your certificate list.
Tips
NoteOnly an expired certificate is treated as an outage — an expiry warning is informational and won't affect your public status page.
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