Introduction

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This section provides an overview of SSL certificates and how they are used on SL1 appliances.

Use the following menu options to navigate the SL1 user interface:

  • To view a pop-out list of menu options, click the menu icon ().
  • To view a page containing all of the menu options, click the Advanced menu icon ().

What is an SSL Certificate?

SSL is an acronym for Secure Sockets Layer. SSL is a protocol for securely transmitting data via the internet. SSL uses a private key to encrypt data to be transferred over the Internet connection. Usually, URLs that include "HTTPS" are using SSL for security.

To implement SSL, an SSL certificate resides on the web server and is used to encrypt the data and to identify the website. The SSL certificate contains information about the certificate holder, the domain for which the certificate was issued, the name of the Certificate Authority who issued the certificate, and the root and the country in which the certificate was issued.

There are two ways to acquire an SSL certificate:

  • You can purchase a certificate from a vendor (called a "certificate authority"), such as VeriSign or GeoTrust.
  • You can "self-sign" your own certificate. Using available tools (both open source and proprietary), you can create and sign your own SSL certificate instead of purchasing from a certificate authority.

SL1 includes a self-signed certificate from ScienceLogic. Self-signed certificates can trigger a warning message in some browsers. For this reasons, some customers might prefer to purchase an SSL certificate from a certificate authority and install the certificate on one or more servers.

SSL on ScienceLogic Servers

Each SL1 appliance includes a self-signed certificate from ScienceLogic.

Each SL1 appliance uses the Nginx web server and OpenSSL.

If you want to use commercial SSL certificates with SL1, you must purchase certificates for the following SL1 appliances:

  • For each Administration Portal, Database Server, or All-In-One Appliance you must purchase two certificates, one for the standard user interface and one for the Configuration Utility.

  • For each Data Collector, you must purchase one certificate, for use with the Configuration Utility.
  • For each Message Collector, you must purchase one certificate, for use with the Configuration Utility.