Spotlight is a temporary geofence around one asset, right where it is standing now. You set it, and Hapn tells you once if that asset leaves. Then it expires on its own — no cleanup, no leftover rule cluttering your alerts.
It's the answer to a specific, common worry: this machine should not move for the rest of the day, and I want to know immediately if it does.
Applies to: the Hapn web app at app.gethapn.com and the Hapn mobile app.
Set a spotlight
On the web:
- Open the asset — select it from the asset list on the Live Map.
- In the bar at the bottom of the map, select Spotlight.
- Choose a Spotlight radius: 50 m, 100 m, 250 m, 500 m or 1 km. It defaults to 100 m.
- Choose how long it stays Active for: 30 min, 1 hour, 2 hours, 4 hours or 8 hours — or select Custom and type any whole number of hours from 1 to 48. It defaults to 2 hours.
- Select Set spotlight.
On the mobile app: on the Live screen, tap the asset to open its card, then tap Spotlight. Choose the radius and how long it stays active (the same presets, or Custom for 1 to 48 hours), then tap Set spotlight.
The panel says exactly what you're agreeing to: "Notify me once if [asset] leaves its current location. Auto-expires."
Two things worth understanding
- It notifies once. Spotlight is not a running alert that fires every time an asset crosses a line — it tells you the asset has left, and that's the job done.
- It expires by itself. When the time you picked runs out, the spotlight goes away. Nothing to remember, nothing to tidy up. It ends quietly — there is no "your spotlight has ended" notification — and while it runs the countdown reads in hours and minutes, so a 36-hour spotlight starts at 35h 59m left.
Longer spotlights: weekends and off-hire
A custom duration of up to 48 hours covers a weekend or the gap before equipment is collected, without re-arming the spotlight every few hours or making a permanent place. Spotlight can only notice the move when the tracker next reports, so on a tracker that reports every few hours the notification can lag the move by up to that interval. If you need to know quickly, check the tracker's update frequency first — see Reporting Modes.
Choosing a radius
The radius is how far the asset can drift before Hapn calls it "left". GPS positions move around slightly even on a parked machine, so a very tight radius on a long window can go off for nothing.
- 50–100 m — a machine parked in a yard or on a compact site, when you want to know about any real movement.
- 250–500 m — a large site, a quarry, a spread-out job where equipment gets shuffled around legitimately.
- 1 km — you only care about it leaving the area entirely.
Spotlight or a place?
They solve different problems, and the panel itself points this out.
- Spotlight — one asset, where it happens to be right now, for anything from 30 minutes to 48 hours. Nothing to set up in advance and nothing left behind.
- A place — a fixed location you care about permanently, any asset, every entry and exit, forever. That's what you want for your own yard, a customer's site, or a service area. See Creating and Managing Places: Complete Guide.
A rule of thumb: if you'd want the same boundary again next week, make it a place. If it only matters until the end of the shift, spotlight it.
Good moments to use it
- A machine dropped at a site overnight that nobody should be touching until morning.
- Equipment sitting in a yard you don't have a geofence around — a customer's lot, a temporary staging area.
- A trailer or attachment parked somewhere you're slightly unsure about, while you get on with something else.
- An asset you've just been told is off-hire, that shouldn't move again until it's collected.
The rest of the asset bar
On the web, Spotlight sits alongside three other controls at the bottom of the map when an asset is open: History (open this asset's past trips and positions), Share Live (send someone a live view without giving them an account) and Settings. The status chip on the left tells you the asset's current state and when it last reported.
On the mobile app, the same buttons sit on the tracker's card: Settings, Spotlight, History and Share Live.
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