The author shares their personal experience with manually monitoring SSL certificate expiration dates in a previous role, which led them to create an InfluxDB template for automating this task. The X.509 SSL Certificate Monitoring Template allows users to quickly define their entire monitoring configuration in one text file and can handle multiple certificates at once. It is free to use with an InfluxDB account and simple to set up, making it a practical solution for businesses to monitor certificate expiration dates and prevent potential financial losses and bad customer experiences. The template uses the x509 Telegraf plugin and can be used in corporate environments or directly in the certificate store.