Question 1

How are alerts delivered?

Accepted Answer

Email is included on every plan and works out of the box — alerts go to your account address with no setup. Paid plans add richer channels you can route anywhere. Channels by plan Channel Free Starter Pro Agency Email Yes Yes Yes Yes Slack No Yes Yes Yes Telegram No Yes Yes Yes Discord No Yes Yes Ye…

Question 2

My certificates auto-renew — why do I still need this?

Accepted Answer

Because auto-renewal fails silently, and the failure modes are mundane: an expired card on the ACME or CA account, a DNS or firewall change that quietly breaks the renewal challenge, a forgotten subdomain served from a different stack that nobody re-pointed, a renewal cron that stopped running after…

Question 3

What counts as "down"?

Accepted Answer

An uptime check fails when the target returns a timeout, a connection error, or a response outside the expected range — by default, anything that isn't a 2xx or 3xx HTTP status. We confirm before we page you A single failed check is rarely a real outage — networks blip, and a momentary timeout from…

Question 4

What does CertSentry monitor?

Accepted Answer

CertSentry watches the failures that take sites down quietly — the ones you don't notice until a customer does. Instead of stitching together a cert checker, an uptime tool and a DNS watcher, you get all of it against one target, in one place. Everything it watches Check What it watches How often Pl…

Question 5

What's included in each plan?

Accepted Answer

Every CertSentry plan runs the same monitoring engine — the same checks, the same multi-region quorum, the same quiet alerting. What changes is how much you can monitor, how often, and which advanced features you unlock. Compare plans Feature Free Starter Pro Agency Price, monthly $0 $5 $12 $50 Pric…

Question 6

How do I sign in? I don't have a password.

Accepted Answer

CertSentry uses magic links instead of passwords. You enter your email, we send a one-time sign-in link, and clicking it logs you in. There's no password to choose, forget, reuse or leak. Signing in Enter your email on the sign-in page. Open the email we send and click the link. You're in. Tips for…

Question 7

How does DMARC monitoring work?

Accepted Answer

DMARC tells receiving mail servers how to handle messages that fail authentication for your domain — and asks them to send you aggregate reports about what they saw. Those reports are XML, they arrive from dozens of providers every day, and reading them by hand is miserable. CertSentry ingests, dedu…

Question 8

How does DNS change monitoring work?

Accepted Answer

CertSentry takes a snapshot of your domain's DNS — A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, NS and TXT records — and tells you when it changes. That single feature catches a surprising range of incidents: an accidental edit in the DNS console, an expired delegation or a registrar that reset your nameservers, a hijack or…

Question 9

Can I upgrade, downgrade or cancel anytime?

Accepted Answer

Yes — there's no contract and no lock-in. You're in control of your plan from the dashboard. Changing plans Upgrade any time — it takes effect immediately and the charge is prorated, so you only pay the difference for the rest of the period. Downgrade to a smaller plan when you need less. Make sure…

Question 10

Does CertSentry watch domain (registration) expiry?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Separately from the certificate, CertSentry tracks when your domain registration expires, using RDAP (with WHOIS as a fallback). A lapsed domain is one of the most painful outages there is — site and email go dark at once, and recovery through a registrar can be slow — so it's worth a warning w…

How can we help?

Getting started

SSL & certificates

Uptime & availability

DNS & domains

Alerts & notifications

Email & DMARC

Billing & plans

Account, team & API

Still need help?