GPS tracker offline: how to know when a vehicle stops reporting

A GPS tracker that goes offline does not raise an alarm by itself: the vehicle stays on the map at its last position and looks parked. To know that a tracker has stopped reporting, compare the time of its last report with a threshold, for example 24 hours, and alert when that threshold is passed. Keep “stopped reporting” apart from “never reported” and “not moving”, because each has a different cause and a different fix.

Why a silent tracker matters

Everything built on telematics freezes when the tracker goes quiet: position, mileage, trips, fuel level. Fuel checks have nothing to compare with, the odometer stops and you cannot tell whether the vehicle is being used. And the vehicle you are not looking at is exactly the one nobody notices on the map. A tracker can go silent because it lost power, was unplugged, has no coverage or because the link to the provider broke. Each of those is worth knowing about within a day.

Three states not to confuse

• Never reported. The tracker is linked to a vehicle but has not sent anything yet. That is usually an unfinished installation, not a failure.
• Stopped reporting. The tracker sent data before and has now been silent for longer than the threshold. This is the one to alert on.
• Not used. The tracker reports normally, but the vehicle has not moved. That is a planning question, not a technical one.

Thresholds, alerts and the likely cause

Pick a threshold that fits how often your trackers report. Too short, and every weekend or depot stay becomes an alert; too long, and a dead tracker goes unnoticed for days. A day is a sensible start; battery trackers on trailers may report less often than trucks.

Then alert once per episode. A tracker that is silent for a month should produce one alert, not thirty. When it reports again, clear the alert, so the next outage is reported afresh.

If several trackers stop at the same moment, look at the integration first: credentials, the provider account, an outage on their side. One tracker on its own is more likely the device: power, wiring, the battery or the SIM.

How Konvoi does it

Konvoi checks every linked tracker from Transics, Ruptela and PAJ GPS every hour. When a tracker that has reported before stays silent longer than the threshold, Konvoi posts an in-app notification with the time of its last report, flags the vehicle as “GPS tracker offline” and includes it in the next daily fleet-health e-mail. The threshold is 24 hours by default and can be set from 1 to 720 hours in Settings → Fleet Health, where the check can also be switched off or limited to certain vehicle types. The e-mail goes out at most once a day, to the workspace admins unless you pick other recipients.

Each silent episode is announced once and re-armed when the tracker reports again. When three or more trackers go quiet at once, Konvoi sends one notification that points to the integration rather than the devices. A tracker that is linked but has never reported shows as “no signal”, and a vehicle with a working tracker that has not moved shows as “Not used”, so the three states never mix.