Mixed-Fleet Telematics: How to Get Geotab, Samsara and the Rest Into One Dashboard

Very few fleets run on a single telematics provider. Acquisitions bring in vehicles fitted with a different system, leased trucks arrive with OEM telematics built in, and the devices installed three years ago still work well enough that nobody wants to pay to rip them out. The result is a fleet whose data lives in two, three, sometimes four separate platforms — each with its own dashboard, its own units, and its own definition of a harsh-braking event. This guide covers what that fragmentation costs, and the practical routes to one unified view.

Why do fleets end up with multiple telematics providers?

Fleets accumulate telematics systems the same way they accumulate vehicles: incrementally, and rarely to a master plan. A merger brings a depot running Samsara into a company standardised on Geotab. New trucks ship with factory telematics from Ford Pro, Volvo Connect or Daimler. A regional manager signed a Verizon Connect contract years ago that still has time to run.

Switching everything to one provider sounds clean but rarely pencils out — it means new hardware, installation downtime across the fleet, and retraining. According to FleetRabbit, around 70% of fleets use two or more device types, so the mixed-provider fleet is the norm, not the exception. The practical question is not "which single provider should we pick?" but "how do we see everything in one place?"

What does telematics fragmentation actually cost?

The cost of fragmentation is mostly invisible, which is why it persists. It shows up as management time, missed alerts, and decisions made on partial data rather than as a line item on any invoice.

The concrete failure modes are consistent across fleets. A manager checking three platforms every morning burns the better part of an hour on status reviews alone. An alert raised in one platform gets missed while attention is on another. And cross-fleet comparisons — the analysis that actually drives cost decisions — quietly never happen, because one system reports speed in km/h and another in mph, and each grades driver events on its own severity scale. Nobody reformats that manually every week, so the fleet-wide picture simply doesn't exist.

The most expensive gap is between diagnostics and maintenance. A fault code fires in the telematics platform, but the work order lives in a separate maintenance system. Without integration, a person has to notice the fault and create the work order by hand — and in a busy operation, that step gets delayed or skipped, turning a cheap planned repair into an expensive roadside failure.

How do you unify telematics data from different providers?

The core work is normalisation: pulling data from each provider's API into one schema, so that a GPS ping, a fuel reading, or a harsh-braking event looks identical regardless of which device produced it. Every serious unification effort — bought or built — does this same job.

Normalisation has three layers. First, units and formats: km/h versus mph, litres versus gallons, timestamp conventions. Second, event taxonomy: each provider defines and grades safety events differently, so you need one scoring model that all providers map into — otherwise you cannot compare a driver on Samsara with a driver on Geotab. Third, identity: a single vehicle registry that maps every device ID, VIN and licence plate to one canonical vehicle record, so history follows the vehicle even when the hardware changes.

The good news is that the APIs are there. Geotab operates an open API architecture with a large integration marketplace, Samsara exposes a full REST API, and most OEM systems now offer data feeds. This is a data-engineering task, not a hardware project — your existing devices stay on the vehicles.

Should you switch providers, buy an integration hub, or build a data layer?

There are three realistic routes, and the right one depends on fleet size and how much of the value you want beyond a unified map.

Switching everyone to one provider is the cleanest long-term option but the most expensive: new hardware, installation downtime, contract exit costs, retraining. It makes sense mainly when existing contracts are expiring anyway.

Buying an integration hub — a product that connects to your providers and normalises the data into its own workflows — is the fastest route and works well if the hub's built-in dashboards match how you operate.

Building a thin data layer with a custom dashboard on top sits between the two. You pull each provider's API into a small warehouse, normalise once, and present exactly the KPIs your operation runs on — cost per mile, idle, PM compliance, utilisation — in a view designed for your morning meeting rather than a vendor's generic template. For fleets that already know which KPIs actually cut costs, this route delivers the most decision value per pound spent, and it keeps you provider-agnostic: when a contract ends or a new depot arrives, you swap a connector, not a platform.

What should the unified fleet dashboard show?

One screen, every vehicle, regardless of provider — with the same five to eight headline KPIs the fleet is managed on. That typically means a live map with status, cost per mile per vehicle, idle percentage, PM compliance, and a single driver-safety score computed on one model across all devices.

The test of a unified dashboard is whether it answers cross-provider questions instantly: which ten vehicles across the whole fleet have the worst cost per mile? Are the drivers at the acquired depot (on Samsara) safer or riskier than the legacy fleet (on Geotab)? Which vehicles have open fault codes and no scheduled work order? If those questions still require opening two platforms and a spreadsheet, the data is connected but not yet unified.

FAQ

Do I have to replace hardware to unify telematics data? No. Unification happens at the data layer via each provider's API. Existing devices keep operating exactly as they are.

Can driver safety scores be compared across providers? Yes, but only after mapping each provider's events into one common scoring model. Raw scores from different platforms are not comparable.

How long does it take to get a unified fleet view live? Connecting APIs and normalising core signals (location, odometer, fuel, faults, events) is typically weeks, not months — the hard part is agreeing the KPI definitions, not the plumbing.

Is it worth unifying a fleet of 30 vehicles on two systems? Usually yes, if managers are checking two dashboards daily. The smaller the fleet, the lighter the solution should be — a thin data layer and one dashboard, not an enterprise platform.

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At Sifra, we build exactly this: a normalised data layer across your telematics providers and one live dashboard your managers actually open. Explore our Fleet intelligence work, or take us up on a free mock dashboard built from a sample of your own data — see your whole mixed fleet on one screen before committing to anything. Data, made visible.