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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.

Paste it into your assistant. It tells you what it will send or change before it runs live.

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

  1. Every day ClickRuntime reads the list of websites in your Google Sheet.

  2. It checks that each site loads and looks up when its security certificate expires.

  3. The results are written back into the sheet.

  4. 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

RunsOn a schedule
Monitor your sites and SSL certificatestoday, 9:00Succeeded
Email · 2 sites need attentionshop.northwind.example: 200, SSL expires in 9 days old.acme.example: DOWN (ConnectionError)

Build your own

Need it to work differently?

This template is a starting point. Copy the prompt and change it, or describe a different automation from scratch, with your own conditions, more apps or an AI step. Your assistant writes it, tests it and runs it on ClickRuntime.
  • 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

This is the Python script that runs each time the automation starts. Your AI assistant writes it for you when you send the prompt, and you allow each step in your assistant. To change how the automation works, describe the change to your assistant and it updates the script for you. For every function it can use, see the script reference.
website_and_ssl_monitor_from_a_sheet_of_domains.pyexample
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?
The certificate presented by each domain is read and its expiry date is compared with today. You choose how many days of warning you want, such as 14 or 30, and domains under that threshold are included in the email.
Will a slow site count as down?
A site that fails to respond or returns an error status is flagged. A site that answers slowly but successfully is not flagged unless the check times out, so this is an uptime check rather than a performance monitor.
Will I get the same alert on every run?
Problem domains are remembered so you are not emailed repeatedly for the same issue. When the domain recovers it is cleared, and a later failure triggers a fresh alert. This keeps the inbox clean during a long outage.
What permissions does it need?
read+write. Nothing else in your accounts is used.
Does it need AI?
No. It runs without AI, so it doesn't use your plan's AI allowance.
How many runs does it use?
One run each time it runs (on a schedule). Checks that find nothing to do and stop right away aren't counted.
Can I change how it works?
Yes. Describe the change to your AI assistant, for example a different schedule, channel or filter. It updates the automation, tests it and tells you what changed.

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