Setting up events - important guidelines – Help Centre

It is important to configure events properly in order to increase their usefulness and minimize unnecessary communication costs and overhead of the solution.

A bad event configuration that generates an excessive amount of events will have a negative impact on the performance and response of MiX Fleet manager and will slow the system down for all other users.

Please read these guidelines if you are new to setting up events in MiX Fleet Manager. If you need instructions on how to set up new events, read Add new event to the organization or Edit an event on the organization level to learn how to customize events.

Event configuration best practices

It is important to remember that each option on the event configuration when enabled, adds to the size of the event and the cost to send and process the event.

There are a couple of principles that are absolutely critical when configuring events:

Only record events that are actually needed and used in reports. Recording events that are not used results in unnecessary costs.
Be sensible when setting the recording type and use detailed only when absolutely necessary.
Active messages should only be used in cases where an event occurrence (such as a panic button being pressed) requires an immediate or real-time response by the live monitoring system. The processing cost and overhead of active messages are very high and unless they are being consumed immediately, there is no point in sending them.
MOST IMPORTANTLY: after creating or modifying ANY event configuration, VERIFY THE REAL-WORLD RESULTS as follows:
1. Upload the configuration to one or two production vehicles (not a bench-test unit or vehicle in a workshop).
2. Let the vehicles operate for 2 days.
3. Run a Detailed Event Report that includes every event in the organization in the event selection criteria, for the test vehicles for those 2 days.
4. If you see any events that trigger excessively or contain useless data – remove them!

Recording types

Detailed - Each start and end of the event will be recorded. This means that duration can be shown for each individual occurrence of the event.
Summarized - The number of occurrences and the total duration (the total amount of time that the event was true) will be recorded with each sub-trip.
Notification - Each start of the event will be recorded. The end of the event is not recorded; hence the unit will record no duration.

General guidelines

Do not create notification or detailed events for parameters that will continuously change during a trip, e.g. Brake Pedal Pressed, Gear Changes, Clutch Engaged, Accelerator Pedal Position, etc. Rather use these type of parameters in a summarized event that only provides the count and total duration at the end of a trip.
Do not select unnecessary recording actions (Start odometer, End odometer, Start Position, End Position, Record Video, Record Fuel Pulse). This will increase the amount of data for each event and will lead to higher communication costs and load on the servers. For example, if you configure an Over Speeding event, adding the record odometer or Fuel pulses does not add value.
Do not record video on events such as “Over Speeding”. If the speed limit is set to 50mph for example and a driver drives exactly 50mph, the event will trigger multiple times in a trip, and each time a video of 60-80 Kbyte will be uploaded to the servers.
Rather set video to record on other harsh events that rarely occur, i.e. Harsh Braking, Harsh Cornering or Harsh Acceleration.
Do not record video on events such as “Out of Green band”. This event makes use of a combination of speed and RPM and the limits are usually incorrectly specified for automatic or modern vehicles. This means that for modern vehicle that uses an Eco mode or with automatic transmission, this event will trigger multiple times and the driver has absolutely no control over it.
If you record data at a regular interval (Ticker Event), make sure that you specify “Ignition ON” or “In Trip (Drive)” as a condition. If for example you set up “Temperature” to record every minute, it will record 1440 events in a 24-hour period. Rather set up events to trigger on exceptions. Examples of data that can be recorded with exceptions are Cold Chain Temperatures, Oil Pressure, Engine Temperature, Tyre Pressure, Fuel Level e.g.:
- Temperature > 50 degrees
- Temperature < 10 degrees
Only use detailed events if you require a start/end and duration for the event. Detailed events require the most resources and have the most dependencies. For example, if you want to create an event when something is switched ON and OFF again but you do not care how long it was ON or OFF, rather create notification events and not detailed events.

Event configuration cleanup

It is important to audit existing event configurations and remove any events from the configurations that are not needed. A lot of times events are added for testing or other purposes and then never removed from the configurations afterward. Actively processing unnecessary events that are not used by anyone is wasteful.

It is also necessary to review existing events to ensure that they are configured optimally and do not have additional recording actions that do not add value or events that are configured as a detailed event when all that is actually required is a notification event.