Checking Expiration Dates and Certificate Types

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This topic describes how to check the expiration dates and types of the certificate authorities (CAs) and leaf certificates that the Ops Manager API manages. After identifying the types of certificates that expire soon, you can determine which certificate rotation procedure to follow.

Overview

You must use the Ops Manager API to manually check the expiration dates and types of the certificates that the Ops Manager API manages. For more information, see Procedure below.

To configure Concourse to automatically monitor expiring certificates, you can use Platform Automation. For more information, see expiring-certificates in the Platform Automation documentation.

Procedure

To check certificate expiration dates and types through the Ops Manager API:

  1. Follow the procedure in Using Ops Manager API to target and authenticate with the Ops Manager User Account and Authentication (UAA) server. Record your Ops Manager access token, and use it for UAA-ACCESS-TOKEN in the steps below.

    Note: When you record your Ops Manager access token, remove any newline characters such as \n.

  2. To retrieve the certificates, call the /deployed/certificates endpoint of the Ops Manager API by running:

    curl "https://OPS-MANAGER-FQDN/api/v0/deployed/certificates" \
      -H "Authorization: Bearer UAA-ACCESS-TOKEN"

    Where:

    • OPS-MANAGER-FQDN is the fully-qualified domain name (FQDN) of your Ops Manager deployment.
    • UAA-ACCESS-TOKEN is the access_token value you recorded in the previous step.

      More options:
      • To limit command output to certificates that expire within a given time interval, append ?expires_within=TIME to the endpoint, replacing TIME with an integer-letter code.
        • Valid letter codes are d for days, w for weeks, m for months, and y for years. For example, querying to https://OPS-MANAGER-FQDN/api/v0/deployed/certificates?expires_within=6m searches for certificates expiring within six months.
      • To make the JSON output more readable, you can pipe your curl command to jq or another text editor with JSON formatting.

  3. The deployed/certificates output lists all CAs and leaf certificates visible to the Ops Manager API, whether they are stored in Ops Manager directly or stored in CredHub. To determine the expiration date and type for each certificate listed:

    1. Determine the expiration date from the valid_until value. For example, the root CA listed below expires on August 12, 2020: 
      {
  "configurable": true,
  "is_ca": true,
  "property_reference": ".properties.root_ca.fb10484dd5541a273c9d",
  "property_type": "rsa_cert_credentials",
  "product_guid": "ops_manager",
  "location": "ops_manager",
  "variable_path": null,
  "issuer": "/CN=ToolsmithsCA",
  "valid_from": "2019-08-13T15:30:22Z",
  "valid_until": "2020-08-12T15:30:22Z"
}
    2. For any certificates expiring soon, use the following rules to identify their types:
      • Non-rotatable certificates: Non-rotatable certificates have the following property value:
        • variable_path is /opsmgr/bosh_dns/tls_ca
      • Non-configurable certificates: Non-configurable leaf certificates have the following property values:
        • variable_path is not /opsmgr/bosh_dns/tls_ca
        • configurable is false
        • location is ops_manager
        • is_ca is false
      • Configurable certificates: Configurable leaf certificates have the following property values:
        • configurable is true
        • is_ca is false
      • CAs: CAs have the following property values:
        • is_ca is true
        • location is ops_manager

  4. After you identify the list of certificates that expire soon, follow one of the procedures listed in Certificate Rotation Procedures in Overview of Certificate Rotation.