This guide contains some best practices and recommendations for ensuring that you track containers effectively through their full voyage, and handle any tracking problems that may occur along the way.

💡 Recommended Approach to Tracking

Initiating tracking

To initiate tracking in OpenTrack, you must send a POST request to one of these endpoints:

• Track a Container
• Track a Master Bill or Booking

This tells OpenTrack to begin tracking a shipment. From there, OpenTrack will go out and retrieve all available data on the container from our sources.

Consuming tracking data

We always recommend using webhooks to consume OpenTrack's data. This allows you to passively receive container events from OpenTrack as they happen in real time, ensuring a better visibility experience with a lower maintenance burden and higher reliability.

1. To register a webhook, you must send a POST request to our Webhooks endpoint. This registration tells OpenTrack which webhook endpoint (URL) to send events to.
2. In your webhook registration you'll subscribe to events. Here is the full list of events you can subscribe to.
3. Then when something happens to one of your tracked containers, OpenTrack will send a POST request to your registered webhook endpoint. This request will include the details of the event, a changes object telling you which change triggered the event, the full container data payload, and some other useful data.

If your endpoint misses some events for some reason, you can always play back webhook events using our Events endpoint.

⚠️ Handling tracking issues

You should also consider what to do when tracking fails or stops. OpenTrack can notify you via webhook when these events happen. To learn more about each type of tracking issue, see the dedicated guides here:

• Tracking Failed
• Tracking Stopped