On a schedule
Monitor your sites and SSL certificates
You're warned when a site in your list is down or its certificate expires within 14 days.
- Runs
- On a schedule
- Apps
- Google Sheets
- AI
- Not needed
- Access
- read+write
Send this to your assistant
Create a ClickRuntime automation: every morning at 7am, check every domain in my Sites sheet, write the status and SSL expiry date, and email me any that are down or expire within 14 days.
First time? Adding ClickRuntime to your assistant takes about two minutes.
Why use it
Why teams use this automation
An agency or in-house web team usually manages more domains than anyone can name from memory: client sites, landing pages, old campaign microsites, staging hosts. A certificate that expires at 03:00 on a Sunday turns a browser into a red warning page for every visitor, and a quietly down site is often reported first by a customer. A monitoring tool for each domain is expensive overkill for a list of thirty hostnames.
On the schedule you set, each domain in the sheet gets an HTTP check and its certificate expiry date is read. Results go back into the sheet (status, response, days left) and you receive an email listing only the problems, such as a site returning an error or a certificate with fewer than a set number of days left.
It suits freelancers, agencies and small IT teams who already keep their domains in a sheet.
What you get out of it
Expiring certificates caught with time to renew
A warning weeks in advance means the renewal is a routine task rather than an incident. No visitor sees a browser security warning on a client's homepage, and nobody has to explain to a client why their shop showed a red page.
Outages found before customers report them
If a site returns an error, you hear within one cycle. Your first message to the client can be that it is already being fixed, which is a much better conversation than apologizing for not knowing.
One monitoring list, no new tool
Adding a site is adding a row. There is no dashboard to configure per domain, which keeps the cost of watching a new microsite near zero. Old campaign sites that nobody remembers still get checked.
A visible record of site health
Results written back to the sheet show current status and days left at a glance, which helps in account reviews with clients who ask what you are monitoring. You can show the actual list rather than describing it.
Alerts that are quiet when all is well
Only problems are emailed, so the message stays meaningful. Teams ignore daily all-clear emails within a week, but they read the one that names a failing domain. That keeps response times short when it counts.
How it works
What happens, step by step
Every day ClickRuntime reads the list of websites in your Google Sheet.
It checks that each site loads and looks up when its security certificate expires.
The results are written back into the sheet.
You get an email listing any site that is down or whose certificate expires soon.
Before it runs live
- Connect your Google Sheets account and pick the spreadsheets it may use
What you get
Build your own
Need it to work differently?
Your own rules
Conditions, thresholds, filters and exceptions, written the way you'd explain them to a colleague.
Any number of apps
One automation can read from one app and update several others. Over 248 apps are ready, and anything with an API works too.
AI where it helps
Summaries, classification, extraction and drafts use ClickRuntime's built-in AI, with no extra key.
On a schedule or on each event
Runs as often as every 5 minutes, or the moment an app sends an event, and keeps track of what it already handled.
Changes you can ask for
- Run it at a different time, more or less often, or only on weekdays
- Add an AI step, for example to summarize, sort or draft a reply
- Add another app, for example also send it to Slack
- Combine it with other Google Sheets steps into one automation
Under the hood
The code that runs this automation
from google.oauth2.credentials import Credentials
from googleapiclient.discovery import build
from datetime import datetime, timezone
from clickruntime import on_trigger, credentials, http, notify
SHEET_ID = "your-spreadsheet-id"
def cert_expiry(host):
# Latest certificate for the host from the public Certificate Transparency log (crt.sh).
certs = http.get("https://crt.sh/", params={"q": host, "output": "json", "exclude": "expired"}, timeout=30).json()
latest = max(c["not_after"] for c in certs if host in c["name_value"].split("\n"))
return datetime.fromisoformat(latest).replace(tzinfo=timezone.utc)
@on_trigger
def run(event):
sheets = build("sheets", "v4", credentials=Credentials(credentials.connection("google", "work")), cache_discovery=False).spreadsheets()
domains = [r[0] for r in sheets.values().get(spreadsheetId=SHEET_ID, range="Sites!A2:A").execute().get("values", []) if r]
data, problems = [], []
for i, host in enumerate(domains, start=2):
try:
status = str(http.get(f"https://{host}", timeout=15).status_code)
expires = cert_expiry(host)
days = (expires - datetime.now(timezone.utc)).days
except Exception as e:
status, expires, days = f"DOWN ({type(e).__name__})", None, None
data.append({"range": f"Sites!B{i}:C{i}", "values": [[status, expires.date().isoformat() if expires else ""]]})
if not status.startswith(("2", "3")) or (days is not None and days < 14):
problems.append(f"{host}: {status}" + (f", SSL expires in {days} days" if days is not None else ""))
sheets.values().batchUpdate(spreadsheetId=SHEET_ID, body={"valueInputOption": "RAW", "data": data}).execute()
if problems:
notify.email_me(f"{len(problems)} sites need attention", "\n".join(problems))
return {"checked": len(domains), "problems": len(problems)}FAQ
Common questions
How is SSL expiry detected?
Will a slow site count as down?
Will I get the same alert on every run?
What permissions does it need?
Does it need AI?
How many runs does it use?
Can I change how it works?
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