Getting started with CompleteStatus

CompleteStatus watches your sites and services — uptime, TLS certificates, DNS, security headers and more — and alerts you when something breaks. This guide takes you from a fresh account to a working monitor with alerts.

1. Create your account

1. Go to /register and sign up with your name, email and password, or use Continue with Google.
2. After signing in for the first time you are taken straight into the onboarding wizard at /onboarding.

Every account belongs to an organization (your billing and team boundary) which contains projects (groups of related monitors — one per site or client works well).

2. Walk the onboarding wizard

The wizard has four steps. Your progress is kept in the session, so a page refresh keeps your place, and you can click Skip for now at any point — you can always add monitors later from /monitors.

Step 1 — Organization

Name your workspace (for example, "Acme Inc."). This renames the organization that was created with your account.

Step 2 — Project

Name your first project. Projects group monitors, alert channels and status pages.

Step 3 — First monitor

1. Enter a Monitor name (for example, "My Website").
2. Enter the URL to watch, including https://.
3. Pick a Type: Uptime (HTTP) or Security headers.
4. Tick "I'm authorized to monitor this target." You may only monitor sites and services you own or have permission to check — this attestation is stored with your monitor.
5. Click Create & run first check.

CompleteStatus runs the very first check immediately, live, so the next screen shows a real result: the HTTP status and response time on success, or the exact error it caught. A failing first check is fine — the monitor exists and keeps checking on schedule.

Step 4 — Watch the whole domain

One click on Add both monitors adds two more checks for the same host:

• TLS certificate — alerts before the certificate expires (checked daily).
• Security headers — grades HSTS, CSP and related headers (checked hourly).

Click Go to dashboard to finish. Finishing (or skipping) marks onboarding complete so you are not sent back to the wizard again.

3. Set up your first alert channel

A monitor without a channel can only show problems in the UI. To get notified:

1. Go to /settings/channels.
2. Click to add a channel and pick one of the 21 types: email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Telegram, Google Chat, Mattermost, Rocket.Chat, Zulip, Webex, Matrix, webhook, ntfy, Pushover, Gotify — or, on Pro and up, the PagerDuty/Opsgenie pager integrations and GitHub/GitLab/Jira/Linear ticketing.
3. Fill in the type-specific details (an address for email, a webhook/workflow URL for the chat channels, bot credentials for Telegram/Zulip/Matrix, an integration key for PagerDuty/Opsgenie, repo/project coordinates + a token for the ticketing types — see /docs/alert-channels for each vendor's steps).
4. Use the test action on the channel to send a test notification and confirm it arrives.

Note: Every channel type except the PagerDuty/Opsgenie pager integrations and the GitHub/GitLab/Jira/Linear ticketing integrations (Pro+) is available on the Free plan. Zapier, Make and n8n connect through automation hooks, also free.

Route a monitor to the channel

Alert rules live on each monitor's detail page:

1. Open your monitor from /monitors.
2. In the Alert rules panel, choose the channel, tick the events you care about — down, up (recovery), anomaly, cert_expiry, grade_drop — and set a cooldown (0–1440 minutes) to avoid repeat notifications.
3. Save the rule. You can toggle, edit or delete rules from the same panel.

4. Reading the dashboard

The dashboard at /dashboard is your at-a-glance view:

• Status counts — how many monitors are up, down, pending (awaiting their first result) or paused/maintenance. Monitors needing attention sort to the top: down first, then pending.
• Open incidents — anything currently broken. Each incident links to its monitor and timeline.
• 30-day uptime — your fleet-wide uptime percentage with a trend versus the previous 30 days. On Free, which shows 14 days of history, it covers the last 14 days and has no trend.
• Worst security grade and certificates expiring soon — the security layer's headline numbers.
• Latency chart and per-monitor sparklines — response-time trends over the selected range.

A monitor only goes down after two consecutive failed checks — a single blip does not page you. See HTTP uptime monitors for the full state machine.

5. What your plan allows

Limits come from your organization's plan:

Enterprise shows 3 years of history.

The monitor limit counts running monitors: paused monitors don't use a slot, so you can keep more monitors than the limit and choose which of them run.

History shown is how far back you can see your monitoring history: the uptime bars on status pages, walls and monitor pages, the dashboard and latency charts, SLA reports and the API's uptime and check results. On Free, a status page shows 14 daily bars rather than 90. History older than that is not deleted. It stays stored and is shown again as soon as you move to a plan that covers it. Your incident list is not affected.

Security scans and all no-cost alert channels are included on every plan, including Free. Reports need Pro or above; multi-step transaction monitors, the REST API, MCP and bulk security scans need Business or above.

Monthly or annual billing

Every paid plan can be billed monthly or annually, and annual billing is roughly two months free. On the Billing page, choose Monthly or Annual above the plans, then subscribe. The prices, buttons and renewal terms on the page follow your choice.

To move an existing subscription to the other billing period, choose that period and press Switch to annual billing (or Switch to monthly billing) on your current plan. You're asked to confirm first:

• Switching to annual starts a new yearly billing period straight away. You're charged the annual price now, less a credit for the unused part of your current month.
• Switching to monthly starts a new monthly billing period straight away. The unused part of your annual payment stays on your account as credit toward your next invoices; it isn't refunded to your card.

Changing plan keeps the billing period you're on unless you pick the other one.

Moving to a smaller plan

Nothing you created is deleted when you move to a smaller plan, or when a paid plan ends. What the new plan doesn't include is paused or switched off straight away:

• Running monitors over the plan's limit are paused, newest first; your oldest keep running.
• Monitors of a type the plan doesn't include (such as transaction monitors) are paused.
• Monitors checked from more regions than the plan allows drop the extra regions (the home region, US East, is always kept), and check intervals faster than the plan allows are slowed to its fastest.
• PagerDuty, Opsgenie and ticketing channels stop receiving alerts.
• Team members beyond the plan's seats, and Client members on a plan without the client role, are suspended (see Teams and roles).
• A status page's custom domain is removed on a plan without custom domains.
• History older than the new plan shows is hidden, not deleted (see History shown above). It is shown again as soon as you upgrade.

The organization's owners get one email listing exactly what changed, and owners and admins see a banner while anything is held back. When you upgrade again, paused monitors resume, suspended members get their access back and the pager and ticketing channels deliver again, all automatically. Regions, check intervals and custom domains are not restored automatically: set them again after upgrading.

Next steps

• HTTP uptime monitors — every field on the monitor form, plus pause, mute and "confirmed down" explained.
• Cron and heartbeat monitors — watch scheduled jobs by having them ping CompleteStatus.
• SSL, DNS and domain monitors — certificate grading, DNS change detection and domain expiry.
• API monitors and assertions — assert on status, latency, headers and JSON bodies.
• Transaction monitors — monitor multi-step API flows end to end (Business and up).
• Importing monitors — moving from UptimeRobot or Pingdom? Bring your monitors over in about 2 minutes.
• What is uptime monitoring? — a plain-English backgrounder on the blog, if you're new to monitoring.