AVL View

The AVL view of the Admin Panel contains two sections: “AVL Feeds" and “AVL Reporting Rates.” The left-side filters section features a date selector that allows you to select up to 7 days's worth of data to visualize at once. AVL data is stored for up to 3 years.

 

Feed Details

The Feed Details section shows you summary statistics about each of your AVL feeds, including the following:

• Latency is the difference between the time that a GPS ping was processed into Swiftly versus the actual timestamp from the GPS ping report. Swifty's latency represents the average latency over the selected time period. Higher latency may indicate a problem in the AVL system.
• Frequency is the average time between GPS pings received from AVL or GPS reports, for reports during the selected date range. The frequency number seen represents the average frequency for all GPS information over the selected time period for each AVL feed. 

 

Feed History

The Reporting Rates chart shows you the historical activity of your AVL feeds with the context of your scheduled service:

• Reporting rate is the total number of reports per minute for each AVL feed. The reporting rate is affected by factors such as the frequency of the AVL feed, the total number of active vehicles, and any potential interruptions to your AVL connection (AVL outages). If multiple AVL feeds are present, users can choose to display a single feed by selecting on the feed name in the chart legend. 
• Scheduled service is provided as context for assessing changes in AVL feed reporting rates. It is defined by service data in your agency's static GTFS files. The historical reporting rate of an AVL feed should generally follow the pattern of scheduled service, with increases or decreases in the reporting rate coinciding with similar increases or decreases in scheduled service. 

Note: The specific values of the scheduled service visualization are not relevant in this chart. Scheduled service is scaled to make comparison easier with the AVL feed or feeds present in the chart. Moreover, AVL feed reporting rates being above or below scheduled service are not necessarily indicative of issues unless broader pattern mismatches exist as well. 

AVL Outages

The Reporting Rates chart is helpful for detecting interruptions to your AVL connection. You can spot drops in AVL connections by examining abrupt declines in AVL reporting rates as shown by the sudden decrease in AVL in the image below.

Note: During an AVL outage, Swiftly cannot assign vehicles from the impacted provider to live service on your dashboard.

Severe decreases in AVL reporting are usually caused by technical issues with the GPS/AVL provider such as:

• An AVL outage
• Empty packets (no new data being sent)
• A change in data format
• HTTP errors

If the interruption is brief, Swiftly will resume vehicle assignment once your provider starts sending AVL data again.  If the issue persists longer than 15 minutes, or if you're unsure about the cause of an AVL interruption or need help understanding it, please contact Swiftly Technical Support at [e-mail].