Adding a certificate authority¶

When you add a certificate authority (CA) to Certificate Manager - SaaS, you create a connection between Certificate Manager - SaaS and that CA. That connection enables Certificate Manager - SaaS to manage certificate life-cycles.

Certificate Manager - SaaS can connect to both external and internal CAs, in addition to its own built-in CA.

Before you begin¶

Before setting up your CA, review the following:

• If you plan to use paid public trust CAs (like DigiCert, excluding free ones like Let's Encrypt), an enterprise CA account is required. Make sure you have a billing setup for pre-purchasing certificate units or for post-use billing. This is simply because our platform doesn't support purchasing individual certificates with a credit card for each transaction.
• Have your CA authentication credentials ready before you can configure and test issuance. Each CA provider has its own authentication methodology.
• Make sure you have been assigned either the System Administrator or PKI Administrator roles required to add new CAs.
• To take advantage of high availability for certificate issuance and management, select a primary VSatellite that belongs to a high availability group. The system will automatically choose a healthy VSatellite from that group to initiate operations. This helps ensure reliability even if one VSatellite becomes temporarily unavailable.

Getting started¶

Select your CA below for a detailed how-to.

Connector CAs using the CA Connector Framework¶

Because of the vast number of possible CAs, it's not possible for Certificate Manager - SaaS to natively support all options out of the box. However, if you use a CA that is not supported by Certificate Manager - SaaS, you can probably use their API to create a custom CA connector using the Venafi CA Connector Framework.

Venafi has developed two fully-supported CA connectors using the CA Connector Framework: one for a private CA, EJBCA, and another for a public CA, Sectigo.

You can use these connectors as-is. If you want to develop your own connector to a custom CA, these topics can help you see how to connect it to Certificate Manager - SaaS using the Certificate Manager - SaaS console.