Samsara, Geotab and Motive Telematics Integration

What telematics integration actually connects

A telematics provider collects a steady stream of data from every vehicle: location breadcrumbs and trips, odometer and engine hours, fuel use, engine fault codes from J1939 on heavy trucks or OBD II on light vehicles, driver assignment, hours of service status, safety events such as harsh braking, and on some units camera clips, reefer temperatures or door sensors. Trailers and heavy equipment often carry their own asset trackers. The provider’s dashboard shows all of it well.

The problem is that your work does not happen in that dashboard. Dispatch needs live positions to promise arrival times. The shop needs engine hours to schedule preventive maintenance. Billing needs arrival and departure times for detention, or engine hours for equipment rental. Payroll needs time on site. Customers want tracking links. Tepia builds the integration that moves the right slice of telematics data into each of those systems, at the right frequency, without someone exporting a spreadsheet every Monday.

Each provider publishes a developer API, and the details differ. Samsara and Motive offer REST APIs with webhooks for events, and Geotab offers the MyGeotab API and SDK with a data feed for incremental updates. Tepia designs around each provider’s model rather than forcing all three into the same pattern.

Use cases and where the data lands

Tepia starts each integration from the decision the data needs to support, not from the full list of fields a provider exposes. Common patterns:

Maintenance is often the highest value target. When odometer and engine hours flow daily into the maintenance system, oil changes and inspections come due by real use, and fault codes can open a work order before a breakdown. See our fleet maintenance software page for that side.

Integrating more than one provider

Mixed fleets are common. A company acquires a competitor running a different provider, leases trailers with their own trackers, or runs Motive in tractors and Geotab in service vans. Tepia builds a normalization layer so every downstream app sees one fleet.

• Identity matching: vehicles are matched by VIN first, then by unit number, with a review queue for anything that does not match cleanly.
• Common units and time: distances, fuel volumes and timestamps are converted to one standard, with all times stored in UTC.
• Event mapping: each provider’s event types are mapped to one internal list, so a harsh brake is a harsh brake regardless of source.
• Source of truth rules: when two sources disagree, such as an ELD and a trailer tracker, the rules decide which wins for each field.
• Adapters: each provider sits behind its own adapter, so switching providers later means replacing one component, not every app.

Tepia also respects driver privacy. Location during personal conveyance or off duty time can be hidden from dispatch views where your policy requires it.

Architecture: webhooks, feeds and storage

Tepia typically builds the integration as a small ingestion service on AWS, Azure or GCP, written in Node.js or Python. Webhooks and feed pulls land on a queue, raw events are stored as received for audit and replay, and normalized records are written to PostgreSQL with time based partitioning so years of breadcrumbs stay fast to query.

Backfills and live updates run on separate lanes so a history import never delays a geofence alert. Each provider’s rate limits are tracked, retries back off, and monitoring raises an alert when a feed goes quiet for longer than expected, which is often the first sign of an expired token or a device that lost power. API keys live in a secrets manager with scoped permissions.

The design follows Tepia’s webhook and event driven integration and data integration and ETL practices, so telematics data can also feed a warehouse for reporting.

How Tepia approaches telematics integration

Tepia’s six phase process applies to integration work as much as to apps, with a US based project manager accountable for each provider connection.

1. Discovery: an inventory of providers, devices and accounts, a review of API access and limits, and interviews with dispatch, maintenance and billing about the decisions they make. Deliverables are an Investigation Summary, an Interview Summary and User Stories such as a shop manager seeing a fault code become a work order.
2. Design: a design questionnaire, then the normalized data model, the field ownership rules and wireframes for any screens that surface telematics data, such as a unit health view.
3. Development and Testing: an Alpha on a subset of vehicles from each provider and a Beta across the fleet, with test plans for event mapping, backfill accuracy, failover and load.
4. Training: hands on sessions for dispatch and maintenance on the new views, and runbooks for your IT team.
5. Launch: historical backfill, a parallel period alongside manual exports, then retirement of the old process.
6. Support: issue resolution, bug tracking and feature requests such as adding a new sensor type.

Discovery typically runs 1 to 3 months, often at the short end for integration work, development and QA 2 to 6 months, and launch about a month. Read about our process.

When the provider dashboard is enough

If you mainly need live tracking, safety scores and compliance reports, the provider’s own dashboard and built in integrations may cover it, and Tepia will say so. Custom integration makes sense when telematics data has to drive work in other systems, when you run more than one provider, or when customers expect tracking inside your own app.

Compare options on our Samsara vs a custom fleet app and Geotab vs custom telematics software pages, see our work, or talk to Tepia about your fleet data.

Frequently asked questions