SSL meta data

[BerndWill]

Hello everybody,

 please help me with this topic:

 Working at a big company (+100.000 employees worldwide), we have an amount 
of data centers and shared services where our webservers, backend server 
etc. are located.

Now it happens from time to time, that certificates are expired and instead 
of our data centers organizing new certificates in time, we often are faced 
with expired certificates and offline connections.

 The only solution from me and my colleagues view (as poor at it sounds) is 
to setup a little python script "pinging" an amount of about 2.000 servers 
in daily intervals checking for the validity of those SSL certificates.

 Though there is a lot of examples demonstrating how to access SSL 
connections, I could not find a documentation about the certificate's data 
(validation information).

I would love to read programmatically some information out of the 
certificates itself (who signed it and what is the validation period, i.e. 
meta data).

 Can someone please help me out here !?

(I know we should better setup a database with validation dates, but believe 
me, we didn't succeed in it)

 Thanks in advance for any help or tip

 Regards

Bernd