Google Drive Activity Dashboard: Unlock Insights into Your Team's Work

The Google Drive Activity Dashboard is a powerful tool that can help you unlock insights into your team's work. It provides a centralized view of all activity within your Google Drive account.

With the dashboard, you can see who's been accessing and editing files, as well as any changes made to file permissions. This information can be particularly useful for teams that work on collaborative projects.

The dashboard also allows you to filter activity by date, user, and file type, making it easy to pinpoint specific areas of interest. For example, you can see which files have been accessed most frequently or which users have been making the most changes.

By leveraging the Google Drive Activity Dashboard, you can gain a better understanding of how your team is working together and identify areas for improvement.

The Activity dashboard is where you'll find the Viewers section when you open it, and you'll see two tabs on the right side.

To access the Activity dashboard, you'll need to follow a few steps. The viewing history of each person the file is shared with is displayed in the Viewers section.

People who have a dash next to their name either have not viewed the file or have opted out of having their view activity shown. This is a useful feature to know about.

The Shared with tab shows everyone the file is explicitly shared with, while the All viewers tab shows a list of everyone within your own Google Workspace environment who has viewed the file (except those who have opted out).

You can also view the number of unique views within a selected time period by checking the Viewer trend tab. This tab is especially useful for tracking changes over time.

The Comment trend tab shows the total comments that have been made and the trend within a selected period of time. You can change the time period using the drop-down box in the top right corner.

The Sharing history tab shows when the files have been shared/unshared, and with whom. This tab is great for keeping track of changes to your file's sharing settings.

To retrieve a report of Google Drive events for your entire domain, you can use the Drive activity report. This report lists information about your Drive documents, such as the 25 most recent Drive events, covering up to 180 days.

To get started, you'll need to obtain an authorization token as described in the authorization guide. You can then use an HTTP GET request to retrieve the report. The request should include the following details:

Here's an example of what the request might look like:

You can see an example response to this API call in the article section.

This report will give you a comprehensive view of all Drive events for your domain, including document views, edits, and more. You can use this information to track activity, identify trends, and make informed decisions about your Google Drive setup.

The Google Drive Activity Dashboard is designed to help you monitor and manage user activity, but what happens when things don't go as planned?

You can troubleshoot common issues by checking the dashboard's settings, which can be accessed by clicking on the gear icon in the top right corner.

The settings allow you to customize the dashboard to fit your needs, including the ability to adjust the time frame for which data is displayed.

You can also use the settings to add or remove specific types of activity, such as file sharing or editing, to be displayed on the dashboard.

By default, the dashboard displays data for all users, but you can narrow down the data to a specific group or team if needed.

For example, if you're a team lead, you can use the settings to view data for your entire team at once.

The Google Drive Activity Dashboard also allows you to set up alerts for specific types of activity, such as when a file is shared or edited.

These alerts can be sent to you or other administrators via email, helping you stay on top of user activity.

By adjusting the settings and customizing the dashboard to fit your needs, you can get the most out of the Google Drive Activity Dashboard.

You can retrieve a report of Google Drive activities for a specific shared drive using an HTTP GET request with the authorization token. This report includes all changes for the shared drive.

To filter the report to show only specific types of events, you can use the doc_type field. For example, to retrieve events that affect all shared drives, you can use the following filter.

You can also retrieve events for membership changes, such as member additions to shared drives, by specifying the shared_drive_membership_change event.

Here are some common event types that you can retrieve using the Google Drive API:

These events can also be viewed in the Admin console, where you can see a report of all events for a specific shared drive.

The Google Drive Activity Dashboard is a game-changer for teams and individuals alike. It enables efficient communication by giving users useful metrics about how people are interacting with their Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides files.

With the Activity Dashboard, you can email collaborators directly through the feature. This is a huge time-saver, as you can use knowledge about view histories to pick recipients and send custom follow-up emails.

You can also see viewers over time, which helps you keep track of how many viewers have visited your file. This is especially useful for adjusting the data range and focusing in on specific data points for more details.

By using the Activity Dashboard, you can stay on top of your team's work and make sure everyone is on the same page.