What is location tracking feature in Hexnode UEM?

Location tracking feature helps organizations to keep track of the location of the deployed work devices. Location tracking policy enables organizations to fetch the real-time location of devices as well as the history of locations traversed by the devices. Location tracking can be enabled for iOS, Android, Fire OS, Windows, and macOS devices.

With Hexnode, you can create and associate location tracking policies to keep a track of your device locations. To track the location of a device, you have to enable location services on the device.

• The feature Force GPS to fetch location (Policies > Android > Restrictions > Basic > Allow Location Settings) enforces location services on Android devices.

• To configure periodic or scheduled location tracking for a device, go to Policies > General Settings > Location Tracking. Enable location tracking and select the intervals (between 15 minutes and 24 hours) at which location has to be fetched.

• With Hexnode, you can also find the instantaneous location of a device using the action Scan Location.

• To initiate the action, go to Manage > Devices > select the devices > Actions > Scan Location.

To view a particular device’s traversed location from the MDM console, go to Manage > Devices > select the device > Location History. The location history of the device will be listed there as well as the device’s last fetched location will be shown on a map. To view the location of all the location tracking enabled devices, go to dashboard > Location History.

You can view and export the location history of either individual devices (Manage > Devices > select the device > Location History) or of all location tracking enabled devices (Reports > Location Reports > Location History) as CSV or PDF files.

The location of the devices can be viewed on the portal using two different mapping services- Google Maps and OpenStreetMap by using Leaflet JavaScript library (default). To fetch the actual physical address of the device using Google Maps, you have to integrate the Google Maps API Key and Google Cloud Platform billing account with Hexnode.

Apart from initiating the location fetching from the MDM console, users can manually report their location with check-in notes using the Hexnode app on their Android devices.

With Hexnode, you can also prevent the workforce from reporting dummy locations by restricting the mock location feature for Android devices (Policies > Android > Restrictions > Basic > Allow Location Settings > Mock Location).

Also, users with iOS devices can view their current location with the built-in map on the Hexnode MDM app.