Today’s IT infrastructures are overrun with machine or non-human identities. They are everywhere—from on-prem data centres and cloud platforms to DevOps pipelines, IoT devices, and APIs. These identities rely on digital certificates to establish trust and secure communications.
But there’s a catch: If you don’t know where your digital certificates are, you can’t manage them. And if you can’t manage them, you’re risking service outages, security breaches, and compliance failures.
That’s why certificate discovery is the critical first step in any effective certificate lifecycle management (CLM) strategy.
Why Automated Certificate Discovery Matters
For PKI admins, maintaining visibility into every certificate across the organisation is both a priority and a persistent challenge. As IT environments grow more hybrid and distributed, manually tracking thousands of certificates through spreadsheets or siloed CA tools becomes impractical.
Automated certificate discovery helps PKI teams:
- Gain complete visibility by identifying all certificates, regardless of issuing CA or deployment location
- Detect rogue or shadow certificates that bypass standard issuance workflows and mitigate security risks
- Track certificate expiration timelines to proactively prevent outages
- Ensure compliance by continuously mapping certificates to policies and security standards
In short, automated certificate discovery ensures every certificate, regardless of where it lives, is accounted for, assessed, and ready for proactive management.
Automating Certificate Discovery with AppViewX AVX ONE CLM
AVX ONE CLM is a certificate lifecycle management solution that gives PKI teams the visibility, automation, and policy control needed to manage certificates across complex hybrid multi-cloud environments. It is designed to simplify PKI and certificate lifecycle management, ensuring trust for machines, workloads, applications, cloud services, containers, APIs, and more.
At the heart of AVX ONE CLM are certificate discovery and inventory capabilities.
Certificate Lifecycle Management with Visibility, Control and Insights – All in One Place
How AppViewX Connectors Automate Certificate Discovery on Network Devices:
AppViewX provides built-in certificate discovery connectors for a wide range of commonly used systems and platforms, including renowned brands such as F5, Linux, and Tomcat, among others. These connectors are designed to scan and fetch certificate data directly from devices, helping you eliminate blind spots with minimal configuration.
However, in the case of legacy devices—especially those that are end-of-life (EOL), end-of-support (EOS), or highly customised—certificate discovery can be challenging due to limited documentation or lack of accessible lab infrastructure. To address this, AppViewX provides a flexible solution through its AppViewX Connectors feature.
This powerful feature empowers users to perform customised certificate discovery, tailored to their specific requirements. All it requires is access to the target devices and their certificates, either through API or CLI. With this minimal requirement, discovery can be quickly and seamlessly executed. In addition to the pre-built connectors AppViewX provides, you can easily create your custom connectors to support unique or unsupported systems.
This offers greater flexibility to support any legacy or new line of network devices that may not be readily accessible.
Additional Certificate Discovery and Post-Discovery Features:
AppViewX further streamlines the discovery process with advanced capabilities:
- Targeted discovery: During certificate discovery, you can choose to discover only the certificates in a particular location or exclude certain certificates as needed.
- Global inclusion/exclusion rules: Connectors in AppViewX allow for global inclusion/exclusion of file locations based on user requirements. You can apply file path rules across multiple devices simultaneously.
- Device-level controls: You can add inclusion/exclusion file paths at the device level.
- Filtering: After discovery, if further filtering is required, you can filter certificates based on specific certificate parameters.
- Group management: Post-discovery, you can automatically group certificates into desired certificate groups in a single operation.
- Workflow automation: If any specific actions need to be performed after discovery, you can utilise the workflow feature (an inbuilt automation framework in AppViewX) to carry out the desired actions.
- End-to-end lifecycle management:. Once the certificates are discovered, the native features of AVX ONE CLM take over, automating certificate renewals and deployment, ensuring they’re always valid, compliant, and correctly installed on target devices.
For PKI administrators, certificate discovery is a foundational requirement for operational resilience and security. Without it, automation falls apart. With it, you gain the visibility and control needed to manage and scale trust across your organisation.
AppViewX AVX ONE CLM makes certificate discovery seamless with a rich library of native connectors and the flexibility to build your own. Whether you’re managing modern workloads or navigating legacy infrastructure, AppViewX helps you discover, manage, and control every certificate, ensuring authenticity and security of your machine identities.
While discovery is the first step, it’s only one part of the broader certificate management process. AVX ONE CLM goes well beyond discovery—offering centralized visibility, end-to-end lifecycle automation, policy-driven control, and crypto-agility to manage machine and non-human identities securely and at scale.
Download the Smart Discovery Solution Brief to learn more about automated certificate discovery from AppViewX.
Talk to one of our experts today for a live demo.