Alerts & notifications

CertWatchr sends nine kinds of alert, by e-mail and, on Pro, by webhook. This page explains what each one means and how to get only the ones you want.

Alert kinds

Alert	You get it when …
Expiry warning	The certificate reaches your alert threshold (30 days on Free, your choice on a paid plan).
Expiry critical	7 days or fewer are left.
Renewal overdue	A short-lived certificate (e.g. 90 days) is still served more than three days after automatic renewal should have replaced it. Usually certbot, acme.sh or cert-manager has stopped working.
CAA blocks your CA	Your DNS CAA records do not allow the CA that issued the current certificate. Nothing is broken yet, but the next renewal from that CA will fail.
Domain registration expiring	The domain itself (example.com for www.example.com) expires at the registrar within 30 days. Works for .com, .net, .org and most generic TLDs; .de, .at, .ch and .eu publish no expiry date.
Servers disagree	The hostname points to several servers and they do not all serve the same certificate — usually one was missed during a renewal. The domain page shows what each address serves.
Certificate renewed or changed	A different certificate is served than at the last check — after a renewal, or unexpectedly.
Check failed	The host could not be reached or the TLS handshake failed, and retrying for about half an hour did not help.
New certificate in CT logs (Starter and Pro)	A new certificate was issued for the hostname. See CT log monitoring.

Every alert names the domain and its label, says what was found, and links to the domain's page.

How alerts reach you

E-mail is on from the start and goes to your account address. Switch it off or on under Settings → Notifications. On a team, every member gets each alert at their own address, with their own settings.

Notification centre (Starter and Pro): the bell at the top right lists every alert that is still open, until the problem is fixed. See Notification centre.

Webhooks (Pro): add up to 10 under Settings → Webhooks. Each one receives every alert, as JSON or formatted for Slack, Teams, Discord, Mattermost or Telegram. See Webhooks.

Language

Every e-mail — alerts, the summary, invoices and account mails such as a password reset — is written in your language, and so are the messages your chat webhooks post (Slack, Teams, Discord, Mattermost, Telegram). The JSON webhook format has no text to translate, so scripts that read it see the same fields in every language.

Your language is set when you register, from the language the page was in. Change it under Settings → Account → Language; the site switches to it at once and opens in it whenever you sign in. The language menu in the header changes only the page you are looking at, not your e-mails.

On a team everyone reads alerts in their own language.

Choose which alerts you get (Starter and Pro)

Under Settings → Notifications → Which alerts you receive, each alert has a switch for e-mail and, on Pro, for webhooks. For example: expiry warnings and failed checks by e-mail, and only "certificate renewed or changed" to Slack.

• Everything is on until you switch it off.
• The e-mail switch at the top turns all e-mail alerts off at once.
• On Free every alert is sent and the switches are locked. If you go back to Free, everything is switched on again; your choices are kept for when you upgrade.

One alert per day, not one per check

After an alert, the same alert for the same domain and channel is not sent again for 24 hours. You get one reminder a day until the problem is fixed — not one per check.

• Renewal overdue and CAA blocks your CA wait a week before repeating.
• Domain registration expiring comes once per registered domain: monitoring www.example.com and shop.example.com gives one alert about example.com.
• A CT alert tells you how many new certificates appeared that day.

Snooze a domain

You already know about the problem — the renewal is booked, the server moves next week. On the domain's page, click Snooze alerts and choose 1, 7, 14 or 30 days. To end the snooze early, click Snoozed until ….

• Checks keep running. Only the alerts stop. A snoozed domain shows a muted bell in the list.
• It ends by itself, and earlier if the certificate changes — a renewal is usually what you were waiting for. You then get the "certificate renewed or changed" alert as usual.
• The first alert after a snooze goes out straight away on the next check.

There is no way to silence a domain for good. If you never want to hear about a host, remove it.

Summary e-mail

A roll-up of all your domains: how many are OK, warning, critical or in error, what expires soon, and which alerts went out. Choose under Settings → Notifications → Summary e-mail:

• Every day — covers the last 24 hours.
• Once a week (Monday) — covers the last 7 days.
• Don't send one — the default.

No summary is sent while you have no domains.

Alert history

Alerts in the top menu lists every alert sent to you, newest first: when, which domain, which kind, which channel, and whether it was delivered. A failed webhook shows the HTTP status and error. Filter by domain, kind, channel or result.

Alerts are not arriving?

1. Check the address under Settings → Account, and your spam folder.
2. Check that e-mail alerts are on under Settings → Notifications, and that the alert you expected is switched on.
3. Open Alerts. If the alert is listed, it was sent and the problem is on the receiving side. If not, the threshold was not reached yet, or the domain is snoozed.
4. Still nothing? Contact support.