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Tracker concepts

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Tracker concepts - Amazon Location Service
Common terminology

This section details common trackers concepts.

Common Amazon Location Service trackers terminology

Tracker resource

An AWS resource that receives location updates from devices. The tracker resource provides support for location queries, such as current and historic device location. Linking a tracker resource to a geofence collection evaluates location updates against all geofences in the linked geofence collection automatically.

Position data tracked

A tracker resource stores information about your devices over time. The information includes a series of position updates, where each update includes location, time, and optional metadata. The metadata can include a position's accuracy, and up to three key-value pairs to help you track key information about each position, such as speed, direction, tire pressure, remaining fuel, or engine temperature of the vehicle you are tracking. Trackers maintain device location history for 30 days.

Position filtering

Position filtering can help you control costs and improve the quality of your tracking application by filtering out position updates that don't provide valuable information before the updates are stored or evaluated against geofences.

You can choose AccuracyBased, DistanceBased, or TimeBased filtering. By default, position filtering is set to TimeBased.

You can configure position filtering when you create or update tracker resources.

RFC 3339 timestamp format

Amazon Location Service trackers use the RFC 3339 format, which follows the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 8601 format for dates and time.

The format is "YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss.sssZ+00:00":

  • YYYY-MM-DD — Represents the date format.

  • T — Indicates that the time values will follow.

  • hh:mm:ss.sss — Represents the time in 24-hour format.

  • Z — Indicates that the time zone used is UTC, which can be followed with deviations from the UTC time zone.

  • +00:00 — Optionally indicate deviations from the UTC time zone. For example, +01:00 indicates UTC + 1 hour.

Example

For July 2, 2020, at 12:15:20 in the afternoon, with an adjustment of an additional 1 hour to the UTC time zone. 

2020-07-02T12:15:20.000Z+01:00

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