HSM Monitoring

The Challenge of Monitoring Enterprise HSMs

Hardware Security Modules sit at the very core of any PKI, digital signing, or trust service infrastructure. When an HSM degrades, misbehaves, or fails silently, the impact is immediate certificate issuance stops, signatures fail, OCSP and timestamp services degrade and compliance obligations are put at risk.

Monitoring enterprise HSMs such as Thales Luna, Entrust nShield, and Utimaco CryptoServer is especially challenging due to:

• Limited historical insight into HSM health and behavior

• No unified view across clusters, partitions, and services

• Difficulty correlating HSM issues with PKI outages

Generic infrastructure monitoring tools do not understand HSM internals or PKI dependencies. As a result, PKI teams often discover HSM problems only after services fail.

Unified HSM Monitoring with PKI Insights

PKI Insights delivers purpose-built HSM monitoring designed specifically for PKI and trust service environments – not generic IT infrastructure.

It continuously monitors multiple functional areas across Thales, Entrust, and Utimaco HSMs, detects failures and abnormal behavior, and generates actionable alerts when defined thresholds are breached.

Key capabilities include:

• Continuous polling of critical HSM parameters

• Threshold-based alerting (warning vs error) configurable by PKI admins

• Automatic detection of configuration changes, failures, and degradation

• Vendor-agnostic visibility from a single dashboard

• Fine level control of what needs to be checked and when

PKI admins gain full historical visibility into:

• HSM uptime and availability

• Performance and utilization trends

• Environmental and hardware health

• Security and operational events

This enables proactive operations instead of reactive firefighting.

What’s supported for each HSM

Thales Luna HSM Monitoring

PKI Insights monitors a wide range of Thales HSM components and services, including:

• Software and firmware versions

• Serial number and HSM model

• HSM utilization, CPU load, temperature, and free space

• Tamper status and self-tests

• Admin login attempts and security events

• Partitions, clusters, and last reset information

• Network, NTLS, NTP, SNMP, SCP, Syslog, and Webserver services

• Token, user, package, and service states

Any deviation, failure, or threshold breach is immediately detected and alerted. PKI Insights detects & generates 50+ threshold based alerts against the above mentioned components.

Entrust nShield HSM Monitoring

For Entrust HSMs, PKI Insights provides deep operational insight into:

• HSM model, product name, version, and firmware

• Serial number, manufacturer ID, and implementation details

• Speed index and cryptographic performance indicators

• Device failures and client connectivity

• Hardware and firmware status

• Module-level information and remote server status

• Temperature, fan speed, battery, and alarms

• Environmental and hardware stability indicators

This ensures continuous availability of signing and CA operations backed by nShield devices.

Utimaco CryptoServer Monitoring

PKI Insights monitors both hardware and operational health for Utimaco HSMs, including:

• HSM model, mode, and operational state

• Temperature, fan speed, battery, and alarms

• Hardware and firmware status

• Connection counts and authentication failure thresholds

• Environmental and hardware stability indicators

This level of monitoring is essential for regulated and high-assurance environments.

Key, Performance, Health, and Compliance Visibility in One Platform

PKI Insights goes beyond raw metrics by evaluating HSM health holistically.

Based on continuous checks across key parameters, PKI Insights:

• Calculates overall HSM health status

• Detects early signs of degradation before outages occur

• Correlates HSM behavior with PKI service impact

PKI administrators can:

• Define alert thresholds per parameter

• Choose whether a condition raises a warning or critical error

• Access complete historical data for audits and troubleshooting

This makes PKI Insights ideal for environments requiring:

• High availability PKI operations

• WebTrust and eIDAS-aligned operational controls

• Audit-ready evidence of HSM monitoring and oversight

All monitoring is performed without exposing private keys only operational and security-relevant metadata is collected.