Troubleshooting Geofences

This topic provides some troubleshooting tips and preventative measures to help avoid issues with Geofence alerts. The Geofence feature design helps to prevent false positives rather than false negatives.

Other considerations are:

  • Latitude/longitude pairs are not necessarily enough to decide if a Geofence alert gets generated.
  • Latitude and longitude obtained by LBS ("locate"/"tracking"/"data collection" features) are not used in the Geofence alert logic.
  • The Geofence takes the accuracy circle into account.
    Note: The accuracy circle information available through the SOTI MobiControl web console Location feature is not precise enough to diagnose Geofence alert problems.
  • By default, Enter alerts get generated when a device has its entire accuracy circle outside the fence at some former point and inside the fence at the current point.
  • By default, Exit alerts get generated when a device has its entire accuracy circle inside the fence at some former point and outside the fence at the current point.

You can use scripts to fine-tune Geofence behavior. For example:

  • writeprivateprofstring Geofencing-Agent IgnoreEdgeCollisions 1
  • writeprivateprofstring Geofencing-Agent MinUpdateDistanceNetwork 0
  • writeprivateprofstring Geofencing-Agent MinUpdateDistanceGps 0
  • writeprivateprofstring Geofencing-Agent FenceCooldownTime 0
  • writeprivateprofstring Geofencing-Agent ConsecutivePointsForAlert 1

You must restart the agent after sending a script.

Note: Sending these scripts together makes the agent highly sensitive. This is not recommended as it may cause excessive false positives. To reset behavior back to the default, send the same script(s) without the final number at the end, then restart the agent.

See Geofence Scripts for more details.

If you test your Geofences using an app to simulate device location, turn the app off when testing with actual GPS data from the device. Alternately, test with one device that gets location data from the GPS simulator app and another device that gets location data from its sensors.