Get started with Amazon Location Service Geofences
Geofences are powerful tools for defining geographic boundaries and triggering actions based on location updates. This guide walks you through the process of creating and using geofence collection resources in Amazon Location. By setting up geofences and evaluating locations against them, you can monitor movement and generate automated events, such as notifications when a device enters or exits a defined area. These features are ideal for applications like fleet tracking, location-based notifications, and more.
Create a geofence collection resource in your AWS account.
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Add geofences to the collection. You can use the geofence upload tool on the Amazon Location console or the Amazon Location Geofences API. For more information about available options, see Authenticate with Amazon Location Service. Geofences can either be defined by a polygon or by a circle. Use a polygon to find when a device enters a specific area. Use a circle to find when a device comes within a certain distance (radius) of a point.
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You can start evaluating locations against all your geofences. When a location update crosses the boundaries of one or more geofences, your geofence collection resource emits one of the following geofence event types on Amazon EventBridge:
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ENTER – One event is generated for each geofence where the location update crosses its boundary by entering it.
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EXIT – One event is generated for each geofence where the location update crosses its boundary by exiting it.
For more information, see React to Amazon Location Service events with Amazon EventBridge. You can also integrate monitoring using services such as Amazon CloudWatch and AWS CloudTrail. For more information see, Monitor with Amazon CloudWatch and Monitor and log with AWS CloudTrail.
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For example, you are tracking a fleet of trucks and want to be notified when a truck comes within a certain area of any of your warehouses. Create a geofence for the area around each warehouse. When the trucks send you updated locations, use Amazon Location Service to evaluate those positions and see if a truck has entered (or exited) one of the geofence areas.
Note
You're billed by the number of geofence collections you evaluate against. Your bill is not affected by the number of geofences in each collection. Since each geofence collection may contain up to 50,000 geofences, you may want to combine your geofences into fewer collections, where possible, to reduce your cost of geofence evaluations. The events generated will include the ID of the individual geofence in the collection, as well as the ID of the collection.
