Renew Radar doesn't issue or renew certificates on your behalf — it monitors them. The Auto-renew flag lets you tell Renew Radar which certificates are already being renewed automatically by something else, like an ACME client (Let's Encrypt's certbot, acme.sh, a load balancer's built-in renewal, etc.), so you can tell at a glance which certificates need your attention and which don't.
When adding a certificate from the Certificates page, toggle Auto-renew and describe it as "managed by an ACME auto-renewal client." You can flip this at any time from a certificate's Edit menu. Certificates flagged this way show an Auto badge on your dashboard, so an expiring one you already have covered doesn't get mixed up with one that actually needs manual action.
ACME renewals fail silently more often than you'd expect — a DNS record changes, a firewall rule blocks the validation challenge, a cron job stops running. Renew Radar keeps checking the certificate that's actually being served over HTTPS every hour, regardless of the Auto-renew flag, so you'll still get an alert if a renewal that was supposed to happen didn't.
Direct integration with ACME clients — so Renew Radar can trigger a renewal itself instead of just flagging one — is on the roadmap. For now, pair the Auto-renew flag with an alert threshold close to expiry as a safety net for every certificate, auto-renewed or not.
