An enter alert is a notification sent when a tracked device arrives in a geofenced zone — the arrival counterpart to an exit alert.
An enter alert fires when a device crosses from outside a geofenced zone to inside it. It is the mirror of an exit alert, and the two suit quite different questions.
Exit alerts dominate safety and asset protection, where the zone marks somewhere a device is supposed to stay. Enter alerts suit situations where you are waiting for something:
That last one is worth noticing — it inverts the usual pattern. Instead of fencing where something should be, you fence somewhere it should not go, and arrival is the exception.
Enter alerts have a characteristic failure that exit alerts largely avoid.
A zone around a depot on a main road will register an arrival every time any tracked vehicle drives past on that road, clipping the corner of the zone for a few seconds. Geometrically these crossings are real. Practically they are meaningless, and they are frequent enough to make the alert useless.
Two responses.
Draw the zone off the road. Almost always the better fix. Most sites have room to cover the yard and entrance without reaching the through road, and tracing a polygon rather than dropping a circle makes it easy — a circle around a depot nearly always swallows the road outside. Use the geofence builder.
Require a minimum stay. Filtering out crossings that do not persist removes pass-throughs, at the cost of delaying every genuine arrival by the same amount. See dwell time for the trade-off, which is real and not always worth taking.
A late exit alert may be the one that mattered — a child who left school twenty minutes ago is twenty minutes away. A late enter alert is usually just mildly annoying, because the thing you were waiting for has happened either way.
That asymmetry justifies different settings for the two directions on the same zone: tighter and faster on exit, more tolerant on enter.
Geoblip’s alerting is built primarily around exits, because that is what the core use cases need — a child leaving school, a trailer leaving a yard, someone leaving a safe area. The physical inside/outside state is tracked in both directions on every position.
Arrival is currently surfaced through the recovery alert: when a device that triggered an exit alert comes back into the zone, you are notified that the situation resolved. For the common pattern — you were told something left, now you are told it returned — that covers it.
A standalone enter alert, for arriving somewhere you never left, is tracked internally as a state change but is not dispatched as a user notification in the current version.
Where a platform supports both, enabling them together on a busy zone doubles the noise, and each drive-past produces a matched pair of arrival and departure events that clutter the log.
Better to decide which direction actually answers your question and enable only that one. If both genuinely matter — arrival at a customer site and departure from it, for billing — expect to spend time on the zone geometry so pass-throughs do not pollute the record. See geofencing for the wider picture.
Last reviewed 7 August 2026.
An exit alert is a notification sent when a tracked device leaves a geofenced zone during a period when that zone is being monitored.
Dwell time is how long a device remains inside a geofenced zone, and by extension the minimum duration a crossing must persist before it counts as real.
Alert debouncing is the practice of suppressing repeat notifications for a condition that is already active, so a single real event produces a single alert.
Geofencing is the practice of drawing a virtual boundary around a real-world place and having software react when a tracked device crosses it.
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