Tracking Shipments
Shipment Monitoring
How Trackberry watches for shipments that have stopped making progress, and where those alerts show up.
9 min readLast updated
Goal
Find out which shipments have stopped making progress, and why, without checking each one by hand.
Before you start
- Nothing to configure. Monitoring runs automatically on every active shipment and costs nothing.
- Notification preferences, if you want alerts by push or email rather than just in-app. See Notifications.
What monitoring is for
Document checks answer “does the paperwork add up?”. Monitoring answers a different question: “has this shipment stopped moving?”
Every day Trackberry checks your active shipments for the ways a shipment can go wrong without anyone noticing. These include a carrier that stopped publishing, an ETA that has passed, a container sitting at the terminal, and a draft nobody validated. Each problem it finds becomes an alert, and alerts appear in three places: the Health column on the shipments list, the Issues page, and your notifications.
Nothing here changes your data. Monitoring only ever reads and reports — a person decides what to do about it.
Where Alerts Appear
The Health column
Every row on the shipments list has a Health dot. It merges two independent things into one at-a-glance signal:
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| 🟢 Green dot | Checks passed, nothing being monitored |
| 🟠 Amber dot | A check warning, or a monitoring alert |
| 🔴 Red dot | A failing check, or a critical monitoring alert |
| Dashed ring around the dot | Monitoring has something to say about this shipment |
The dot always shows the worse of the two, so a clean set of document checks can’t hide a shipment that has been silent for a fortnight.
Hover the dot to open a popover with two sections. Monitoring comes first, with each alert’s summary and how long it has been open. Document checks follows, with each check’s status and message. Critical alerts sort to the top.
The Health column is always visible and can’t be hidden from the column picker.
The Issues page
Issues in the main navigation lists every open alert across your shipments, most urgent first. Filter by type or severity, then open the fix for each one.
If you can’t act yet, Snooze hides an issue for 1, 3 or 7 days. Dismiss removes one that needs no action. An issue leaves the page as soon as the problem is fixed, and a snoozed or dismissed one comes back if it becomes critical.
On the shipment page
When you open a shipment with open alerts, they appear as banners at the top of the page (amber for a warning, red for critical). Each banner shows the alert’s title, how long it has been going on, and a sentence explaining what to look at.
Notifications
When an alert is worth telling you about, Trackberry sends a Shipment stalled notification. It appears in your notification center like any other. A critical alert is Urgent and a warning is Informational, so push and email follow your choices for that category under Settings → Notifications. See Notifications for the channels.
Notifications are grouped: one message per shipment listing everything wrong with it, not one message per problem.
Your phone gets a single push per organization from the daily sweep, such as “8 shipments need attention”, and only for alerts that are new or have escalated. Reminders for an alert that is still open appear in your notification list and email but don’t push. Tapping the push opens the shipment when only one is involved, and the Issues page otherwise. See the morning digest.
A rollover the carrier reports directly doesn’t wait for the daily sweep. It sends its own Rolled over notification as soon as Trackberry sees it, and isn’t repeated in the Shipment stalled message.
What Trackberry Watches For
Tracking
| Alert | Fires when |
|---|---|
| Provider stopped tracking | The tracking service told us it has stopped following the reference. Either the carrier feed returned an error, or the service dropped the shipment. A drop usually means it considers the voyage finished. There is no waiting period, because the service said so directly. Critical after 2 days. It clears by itself when the service starts answering again. If the cargo is still moving after a drop, register the shipment again. |
| Tracking has gone dark | The tracking service hasn’t been able to reach the carrier for 36 hours. Critical at 72 hours. Air shipments only — the ocean service doesn’t report when it last reached the carrier, so ocean silence is covered by the alert below. |
| No carrier update | The carrier has published nothing new — after 1 day for air, 36 hours for ocean. Critical at double that, unless the vessel’s AIS position is still moving: a moving vessel proves the voyage is fine, so it stays a warning. |
| Carrier never reported | Registered with the tracking service 3+ days ago and the carrier has never published a single milestone, position or ETA. Usually means the reference is registered against the wrong carrier. Critical after a week. |
| Reference not recognized | The tracking service still doesn’t recognize the B/L or AWB number 2+ days after the shipment was created. Confirm the number with the shipper. Critical after a week. |
Schedule
| Alert | Fires when |
|---|---|
| Past its ETA | The ETA passed 2+ days ago and no arrival has been published. Critical after a week. |
| No ETA | A validated or in-transit ocean or air shipment has no ETA from the documents, the containers or the carrier, 3+ days after it was validated. Critical at 14+ days. It is no longer raised after 42 days for air and 90 days for ocean, which is when the shipment is due to be auto-archived. It is not raised for past shipments, or for references the tracking service doesn’t recognize, which have their own alert. |
| ETA has slipped | The current ETA is 5+ days later than the one first quoted. Critical at 14+ days. |
| Rolled over | A container was moved to a later ship and now departs 5+ days later than planned. Critical when it’s rolled a second time. It also fires when some containers on the shipment sailed more than a day ago while another is still waiting to load. Ocean shipments only. It stays up for up to two weeks after the roll, or until the shipment arrives. Tell your customer the arrival will move, and confirm the new booking with your forwarder. |
| Sitting at the terminal | Discharged at the destination terminal 5+ days ago with no gate-out recorded. Critical at 10+ days. It is worth checking for demurrage, customs holds or a missed collection. The alert fires regardless of your free days, but not for LCL shipments, whose container belongs to the forwarder. To count down against your actual terms and get a warning before the last free day, see Demurrage & Free Time. |
Workflow
| Alert | Fires when |
|---|---|
| Waiting for approval | An emailed shipment has been sitting unapproved for 2+ days. Nothing is processed until someone approves or rejects it. Critical after a week. |
| Draft never validated | A shipment has been in draft for 5+ days, so its figures were never confirmed. Critical at 14+ days. The banner reads “In draft for 12 days and not validated yet, so its figures aren’t confirmed.” A draft can still be tracked, so carrier updates may well be arriving. Once the carrier reports the cargo arrived, the alert drops to a warning and says so, and it no longer sends notifications. The banner stays on the shipment page. |
| Failing checks left unresolved | One or more document checks have been failing for 3+ days. |
Documents, quality and free time
| Alert | Fires when |
|---|---|
| Phytosanitary certificate missing | A shipment that needs a certificate has none yet. Ocean: from 48 hours after departure, critical when the ETA is within 3 days. Air: from 6 hours after the shipment is created, critical when the ETA is within 24 hours. Only raised if your organization normally sends these certificates to Trackberry. You can ask the supplier for it from the Issues page. |
| Document correction needs attention | A request to fix a document has stalled: the supplier didn’t answer, the link expired, or the file they sent changed nothing. Critical after a week. |
| Quality below standard | An inspection report from the last 30 days grades the shipment C or D, or scores a pallet 4 or lower. A D grade or pallet is critical. |
| Free time running out | A container’s demurrage free time is at risk. See Demurrage & Free Time. This appears on the Issues page but sends no extra notification, because free time has its own. |
Trackberry also runs internal monitors for its own systems, such as documents stuck in processing or tracking polls that stopped running. Those are ours to fix and never appear in your alerts.
Which Shipments Are Monitored
The daily sweep covers shipments that are:
- not archived
- not in warehouse (the cargo has arrived and been received, so there is nothing left to watch, apart from a recent inspection report)
- created in the last 6 months
Individual alerts narrow this further. Tracking alerts, for instance, skip road freight, shipments with no transport reference, shipments whose tracking you’ve manually overridden, and shipments whose tracking is already complete.
The Life of an Alert
- Opens. The sweep finds a problem for the first time. You’re notified.
- Stays open. Each day the sweep re-detects it and refreshes its summary. You are not notified again — nobody needs the same message every morning.
- Escalates. If the problem gets worse and crosses into critical, that’s news, so you’re notified again.
- Reminds. If it’s still open a week later and nothing has changed, you get one nudge in your notification list and by email. It doesn’t push to your phone.
- Resolves. As soon as the sweep stops detecting it (for example, the carrier published something, the draft was validated or the container gated out), the alert closes itself silently.
Trackberry remembers that the alert was resolved. If the same problem comes back later, it is treated as a new alert and is not ignored.
Alerts are worked out from your shipment data. Fix the underlying problem, or let the shipment move on, and the alert disappears on its own. To set one aside until then, snooze or dismiss it on the Issues page.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did I get a “No carrier update” alert on a shipment that’s clearly fine?
Carriers publish milestones at port calls, so weeks can pass mid-ocean with nothing new. Trackberry’s thresholds are set to catch feeds that have stopped completely, but a quiet leg on an unusual route can still trigger them. Hover the freshness stamp on the shipment’s tracking card to see exactly which source stopped updating. See Container Tracking.
Can I turn individual alerts off?
Not per alert. You can turn off push and email for Urgent and Informational in your notification settings, or set Shipment stalled to Off (in app only). Either leaves the alerts in the notification center, the Health column and the Issues page.
Does monitoring cost anything?
No. It reads data Trackberry already has — it makes no carrier or tracking service calls of its own.
A shipment shows a dashed ring but no failing checks. Why is the dot amber?
The ring means monitoring has something to say; the color reflects the worse of checks and alerts. An amber dot with a dashed ring and all-green checks is a shipment whose paperwork is fine but which has stopped making progress.