Geofences and troubleshooting

What is a Geofence and how do I set up one (or many)?

Prey allows you to set up Geofences and automate actions whenever devices enter and/or leave said zones. This is specially useful for users who lend devices and do not want them to leave a neighbourhood, city, or even state!

Let's set up our first Geofence now!

Video Demo

Step by Step

You'll need to go to your Prey panel, and select the "Geofences" option on the lateral tab:

Then, you'll see an option to create your new Geofence right away. Just click on "Let's do it!"

Your web browser may ask you to get permission to get your location. While this is not mandatory, it may make your process easier if you are setting a Geofence right where you are now, as it will display the map around your current location.

Now you will have to configure your first Geofence, you'll need to add the name of it, as well as type. This is a new feature. Before, you only had the radius option, while now you can use geographic divisions as well!

Radius Type:

You can fine tune the search by dragging the pin and moving it on the map, or by typing down the address you want to have at the center of the control zone. You can also give the fence a cool name and/or color if that helps you identify it later on (specially if you plan to have many fences).

Another important thing you can do there is to select the size of the geofence. For this, it is important to consider, specially for laptops/desktops, that location tracking accuracy may vary depending on how many Wi-Fi networks with strong signal may be around. Therefore, if you are setting a geofence on a rural area, please consider a bigger size that you would normally consider for this purpose.

This is how that would look like:

Geographic Division:

This new feature allows you to create geofences for Country and subdivision (depending on the country, that would be State, region, etc). Here's an example:

Geofencing Actions

Once you have selected which kind of geofence you prefer.  Prey allows you set up automatic triggers that integrate with the zone settings to precipitate reactions, allowing you to save time and manage your devices in an effective way. 

You can select whether an email notification is sent every time a device gets in or out of the geofence. Even better than that, you can select who is notified (either all admins, all users, or an specific user). 

You can also set actions when a device enters or leaves a specific geofence or both instances if you wish. This particular feature helps you manage and keep greater control over your managed devices in an automatic way. 
The following actions can be activated based on a pre-configured rule:

• Sound Alarm
• Send Message
• Lock Device
• Mark as missing

Here's how that looks like:

Now, you'll be able to add the devices you need on that fence and set up the actions you want triggered. You will also have the option to receive emails for those events. You'll be able to filter them by label, OS, and more!

Once you have selected and moved the devices to the "selected devices" block, you can click on continue to go to the summary. If everything is good, you can click on Create Geofence and it will be ready. Otherwise, you can always go back and edit anything you may need.

Geofencing not working as expected?