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.
• 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:

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.

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.