April 2025

Introduction

The following enhancements are available as part of the Exceptions page and reports Beta feature enhancements.

Users can access this feature by enabling it on the Beta Features tab of their User Options page. For more information on how to enable features that are not widely available, see Enabling Beta Features in the Product Guide.

When this feature is enabled all Exception Summary templates, including all Dashboard, dropdown and emailed reports, will follow this new approach.

Time zone enhancements

Currently, exception events in MyGeotab are presented in the viewer/requester’s time zone, regardless of whether they are accessed through the UI or via reports. All device or driver time zones are converted to the time zone of the database user viewing exceptions.

The new exceptions feature approach preserves the original time zone of each event, based on the time zone setting of the device upon initial setup.

Example A: Specific date ranges

A user with a timezone of Toronto (ET/UTC-5) is running a report for a set of devices where Device A belongs to the UK (UTC), and Device B belongs to China (CST/UTC+8).

If the user runs a report selects a FromDate: Jan 1, 2025 00:00 ET and ToDate: Jan 2, 2025 00:00 ET, in the backend, the application will retrieve the following data:

1. Data for the Device A from Jan 1, 2025 00:00 UTC to Jan 2, 2025 00:00 UTC,
2. Data for Device B from Jan 1, 2025 00:00 UTC+8 to Jan 2, 2025 00:00 UTC+8.

This data will be shown in the UI in the timezone each device belongs to.

Example B: Relative date ranges

A user selects the Yesterday stock date range option, when the current date is January 15, 2024, 10:00:00 ET (UTC-5).

The Yesterday date range will be calculated as January 14, 2024, 00:00:00 ET to January 14, 2024, 23:59:59 ET (UTC-5).

The user’s request involves only one device, and its timezone is UTC+8. The application will pull the exceptions for the device that occurred in the date range selected by the user, but only in the device’s timezone (UTC+8).

Performance enhancement

The new enhancements also include a significant boost in performance for the Exceptions page in MyGeotab. Historical data is now pre-aggregated, which significantly reduces the amount of real-time processing required to load data.

Enhancements and existing reports

Built-in reports and templates

Pre-existing and built-in reports will now have an additional Timezone column added to the report sheet that will be populated with the data’s timezone. If the enhancement feature is not enabled, this column will not be populated, and the data’s date and time will still be in the requestor’s time zone.

This column will be populated based on what entity the user has chosen to run the report by. For example, if the user is running the report by device, it will be populated by the device’s time zone.

The Time Zone in the header now represents the requester/user’s time zone.

Alt text: Exceptions Summary report showing the top level Time Zone indicating the requester’s time zone, and the exceptions data sheet showing the device time zone column.

Custom templates

There will be no immediate impact on custom reports and times will remain local to the requester’s time zone throughout the report.

For users that want to leverage these enhancements in custom reports, an additional Timezone column will be available in the hidden Data sheet and populated with the data’s time zone. Users can utilize this column and incorporate it in other tabs as they see fit.

Enhancements impacts on the date picker

In order to provide an efficient experience and minimize immediate processing, the following modifications have been implemented to the relative date ranges: