Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

SSL certificates are critical for securing websites, web applications, and APIs. They encrypt data in transit, verify server authenticity, and build user trust. However, SSL certificates have a limited lifespan, typically ranging from 90 days to one year. When a certificate expires, visitors encounter security warnings, some services stop working, and it can affect search engine rankings. Monitoring SSL certificate expiration is essential to maintain secure and uninterrupted online services.

APIs form the operational backbone of SaaS platforms. They authenticate users, deliver application data, process transactions, and connect multiple services into a cohesive ecosystem. When an API slows down or fails, the impact is immediate: login delays, frozen dashboards, broken customer workflows, and degraded user experience. For DevOps teams, this means monitoring must go far beyond checking status codes.

In my previous posts, we discussed the where and the how of managing your ML assets. We showed you how JFrog Artifactory acts as a powerful, universal model registry (the “where”) and how the FrogML SDK serves as the gateway to get your models and metadata into it (the “how”). Now, let’s talk about the why.

Monitoring starts with data, but action depends on timely alerts. When an alerting workflow relies on scheduled queries or external checks, engineers miss short windows where values shift and conditions form. The alerting plugin closes that gap by evaluating alert rules inside InfluxDB 3 as new values arrive, enabling faster detection and more responsive monitoring.

Start with distributed tracing to find which service is slow, then use continuous profiling to see why the code is slow, and finally apply high-cardinality analysis to identify which users or conditions trigger the problem. It's 2 AM. Your phone buzzes. Users are reporting timeouts. The metrics dashboard shows p99 latency spiking from 200ms to 4 seconds, but everything looks normal—CPU at 60%, memory stable, no error spikes. A quick pod restart helps briefly, then latency climbs right back up.

The financial service industry has spent years modernising their software delivery pipelines. Build and test cycles are fast, infrastructure is automated, and engineering capability is no longer the bottleneck. The slowdown now occurs at the end of the process: the last mile, where a change must prove it is safe before it can enter production. This final step is governed by a trust layer with people in it.

Controlled chaos engineering experiments that simulate real-world disasters quantitatively measure the impact of failures on system performance.