We've discussed Certificate visibility in Aria Operations previously, but nothing in depth around vCenter Certificates, let's explore.
Looking at a vCenter (captured by vCenter Adapter) you'll see there are two Certificate related properties.
One gives the number of days to expiration (in Days) the other gives the Certificate Expiration Date (in ms since the Epoch). Converting this Certificate Expiration Date (ms) to a date gives May 5, 2026.
And as you can see, this matches the End Date being captured in the Certificate Summary. Using the vCenter Server object type and these properties, I created a View to be used in a Dashboard, it looks like this. Note: these are the vCenter TLS Certificates.
Now, we get other vCenter Certificates as well, namely the SSL, STS, and Root Certificates. They are visible in Operations Diagnostics, which was introduced in 8.18. These are being captured by the VMware Infrastructure Health (VIH) Management Pack, which is now installed and configured by default (nothing for you to do). However, it creates it's own Object Types, one of which is Certificates, which I am using to create this list of vCenter Certificates.
As you can see, these Certificate Object Types are formatted as follows:
VCENTER-vcentername-certificatetype-certificate
We also get the Type, Expiration in Days, Expiration Date, and more. The nice thing is that these are descendants of the vCenter Server Object Type we captured earlier, so we can show all of them easily on a single Dashboard.
This allows you to see vCenter TLS, STS, SSL, and Root Certificates all on a single Dashboard. If you'd like this Dashboard (and Views) you can get it here.
We can also Alert on these as well. I've configured two Alert Definitions here, one for vCenter Servers and one for Certificates (which is the VIH Object Type).
Alerts will be generated on these intervals:
90-120 days | Info Alert
60-90 days | Warning Alert
30-60 days | Immediate Alert
0-30 days | Critical Alert
If you'd like these Alert Definition you can get them here. These Alerts, along with the Dashboard above should allow you to stay ahead of the Certificate expiration game, enjoy!