letsencrypt / letsencrypt/boulder

Add external issuance monitoring tool

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Dominant language
Go
Stars
5.8k
Forks
649
Avg merge
3d 23h
Merged PRs (30d)
24

Description

Right now we do end-to-end issuance testing with Certbot in a cron job, and analyze the resulting output to generate alerts. This has a few weaknesses:

  • The DNS challenge type uses an external DNS provider, which sometimes throttles us. That limits how often we can do test issuances, and also increases flakiness. The flakines means we require multiple failures before raising an alert, to avoid alert fatigue.
  • We generate failures based on command status codes rather than Prometheus.

Instead we should write a Go binary that speaks the ACME API and does various types of issuances (and revocations) on a configurable schedule, exporting Prometheus metrics. This binary should also be able to act as its own authoritative DNS server, so that it's not limited by external DNS providers.

Types of requests it should make:

  • Single SAN issuance for DNS-01, TLS-ALPN-01, and HTTP-01.
  • 100-SAN issuance for each of the above.
  • Revocation (and subsequent OCSP request to verify).
  • Single-SAN issuance for a non-authorized domain name (verify failure).

Issuances should happen on random subdomains of a configurable registered domain. Random subdomains avoid rate limiting based on duplicate certificates.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

The issue names no implementation files or tests. Start by locating the current Certbot cron-based issuance and output-to-alert flow, then map the proposed Go binary's ACME request types, scheduling, DNS authority, and Prometheus metrics. Done means the listed issuance, revocation, OCSP, and failure checks work on random configurable subdomains without relying on an external DNS provider.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
go, prometheus
Domain
backend, observability-sre
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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