Turn time forward and check whether your TLS/SSL certificates are valid.

Motivation

Noticing the TLS/SSL certification expiry too late is one problem you can easily avoid by frequently checking your expiry dates. While observability tools already handle this job nicely, you can't know whether they are working in your environment. With this experiment, you can turn the time forward to check whether your HTTPS endpoint works at a given date in the future. Additionally, you can configure one of the observability integrations to validate your observability tool's alerting.

Structure

First, we validate that the given HTTPS endpoint is working today. Next, we will travel with the host in time to validate that the HTTPS endpoint continues to work on a given date. If the TLS/SSL certificate has already expired at that date, the HTTP check will throw failures.

Warning

Please be aware that we will manipulate the time for a given host. Applications running at that host may struggle to deal with the change in the clock correctly, and you may experience other side effects.