January 12, 2024

Dashboard section moved up in the Home section

Dashboards have moved up in the home section of the platform. As they are the best place to see information which makes sense to you, it’s where they belong. Note that the default landing page is still the same (the asset list) and if you customized your landing page, nothing will change when you log into the platform.

More custom dashboard UI improvements

Having made the first public release of custom dashboards last month, we continue fine-tuning the solution. It is now possible to upload images to customize the dashboard overview page. If no image is supplied, a default image is used. Several smaller UI improvements were also made to the dashboard overview.

Associating an image with a dashboard will make it easier for end-users to quickly find the dashboard they are looking for. And it just looks nicer as well.

Export as report from the asset map now applies the same map bounding box filter

When you are using the asset map to view the locations of assets, then the visible map area automatically acts as a filter to populate the left-pane list of assets. So, as you zoom and pan the map area, the left-pane list content changes on the fly. This behavior has always been present.

What has changed with this release: While on the asset map, if you click the button, then the active viewable map area is also automatically applied as a filter criterion.

This provides an easy way for users to quickly create a report on a selected (rectangular) geographical area, without the need to create a geozone first.

Copying column values to the clipboard or exporting to file

Some regular users of the Sensolus platform want to quickly copy-paste specific asset or tracker information without the hassle of exporting to an excel file. For example, you have a list of 20 trackers and you easily want to paste the serial numbers, asset names or 3rd-party-ID fields into an email you are sending to a colleague.

So, as a small quality of life improvement, a column action Copy column data on page to clipboard is now available which will copy all the values of a certain column to the clipboard. Note that this copies only that values of the current page. So ideally, first set the list page size to the maximum.

You can also quickly export all the available rows of the column to file by selecting Export Full column data as report. Use this if the amount of rows exceeds the page size.

Geozones can be imported by address

Up until now, it was always required that you provide the exact latitude and longitude coordinates when importing geozones via file. However, this is not always practical because often these coordinates are not available in any other source system. Especially when using geozones to model the locations of your organization's customers, you typically have a large list of customers with only address data available.

For this reason, we have improved the geozone import functionality so you can now import by addresses without needing latitude / longitude coordinates. While importing, the Sensolus platform will automatically perform reverse geocoding to translate the address to the best possible coordinate match. Such geozones are created as circular geozones, centered on the resolved coordinates. If no location could be resolved, a warning is shown.

Custom data with URL hyperlinks

Custom data text fields are often used to provide additional information about the asset to the end-users. In this same context, we also had requests of several users wanting to add hyperlinks to external sources of information.

We now have added the possibility to render a string field as a hyperlink (which will open the linked URL in a new browser tab when clicked by the end-user).

Improvement of Sensor value and Orientation states selection in alerts

Some improvements are made to the external ble sensor alerts and the orientation alerts. The sensor value alert and the orientation state alert using default states are now more easy to configure.

For External BLE Sensor alerts, it is no longer required to enter the sensor index - this was too technical. Instead, select the sensor type.

Default and custom orientation states are also automatically available, so much easier to directly select the one you need in your alert.

Tracker configuration page redesigned

When applying a new tracker configuration to tracker, you will notice that the option selection page has been improved. We make better use of the screen width and rearranged some elements in order to make more information directly visible on the screen, requiring less vertical scrolling. No functional changes, only resesign of the user interface.

Read more about the tracker configuration information

Modifying the start-date of maintenance programs with automatic initialization.

When you are starting to apply a time-based maintenance program on a large set of assets, you might initially have a situation where your organization is already a tracking maintenance using a paper-based workflow (externally from the Sensolus platform). In that case, you'd want to use the automatic initialization for assets that will start a new cycle; but you'd want to use the file import to modify the start-date of assets already under a paper-based maintenance program.

Before this release, it was not possible to modify the start-date of maintenance programs having automatic initialization. This is now made possible from this release onwards.

Also, a considerable technical performance improvement was made when importing the initialization for a large number of assets.

Sigfox micro-base stations added to infrastructure

Sigfox micro base stations are now visible in the admin → infrastructure section. The goal of this feature is to provide the system administrator with some diagnostic online status information (it is not intended to become a configuration interface). The "last time seen" field will be updated whenever the micro-base station receives a message from a Sensolus tracker. When the base station has not received a message for 48 hours it will be declared as "Not OK". Also, the time-series visualization will show the hourly number of messages received over time.

It may take some time before we register all existing micro-base stations in the platform, so contact Sensolus if you are interested in this functionality and need to see your base stations registered in this list.

Read more on how to manage your infrastructure.

Import tracker settings via bulk xlsx/csv file (instead of only via API)

We added the possibility to import tracker settings in bulk via a file in the same way as it exists to import geozones.

Improved NB-IOT diagnostics

Starting from their initial release, Sensolus NB-IOT trackers include signal quality data - more specifically the ECL, RSRP and RSRQ values - in the device messages history. However, since we just displayed the numeric values, it was a bit hard to interpret these unless you are a real specialist.

With this release, these indicators are made more user-friendly. The RSRP and RSRQ values are mapped to a category (Excellent - green / Good - yellow / Fair to poor - red) according to the industry convention. Additionally, RSRP and RSRQ are now available as histograms in the tracker diagnostics.

These small improvements should make it easier to determine communication signal quality when you are investigating unexpected NB-IOT tracker behavior.

Read more about these tracker diagnostics.

Improved device firmware history

You now have better visibility on the firmware history of individual trackers. It already indicated when firmware update files were queued and when they were effectively applied. Now, we also show the user that has queued the updates, and whether they are queued for updating via BLE or via NB-IOT.