Please Note: the following information is valid for Enterprise accounts only with the exception of Service Health, which is available for all.
Whether you’re a small 5 man office, or a large organisation with tens of thousands employees worldwide, if you’re using Office 365 it’s important for you to know what is going on in your SharePoint Online environment. You need to know how much storage you’re currently using, for compliance reasons or similar you may want to know who edited which file, and generally also you may want to know how stable Office 365 has been recently and if there have been any outages.
In this article, I will cover all of this.
Monitoring Activities
To find out who did what and when, for example who checked out a file, who delete a list item, and similar, SharePoint provides auditing. You can set auditing individually for various events, however by default none of them are activated. So, the first step is to open your team site (or any other Site Collection), and go to its Site Settings
In there, under Site Collection Administration, go to Site collection audit settings
You will see the following screen
As you can see, you can set several options here. Choose the ones you want to have audited (such as Deleting or restoring items and Editing users and permissions) and click on OK. The settings are now applied, and whenever one of the events that you select gets triggered, it is recorded in the audit log,
To run a report on the audit logs, once again you need to go to the site settings, and this time select Audit log reports. You are then presented with a range of options:
After selecting one of them, you need to define where the generate report file (an Excel spreadsheet) should be stored.
If all went well, you’ll see the following dialog
Click on Click here to view the report to open the file
Here’s a preview of what you get to see inside a report:
There are two sheets, one that shows you an overview of the data, and one that shows you all the data itself.
Monitoring Storage and Resources
The next thing you want to check out is how much storage you’re using, which can be done for each of your site collections. In the admin portal, click on Manage under SharePoint Online
After that, click on Manage site collections
You now get to see the overview of all your site collections. In the upper right corner you can see how many available resources (used for custom solutions) and storage you still have available. In the table itself, you can see for each site collection the total storage assigned to it, as well as the total resources made available for it.
Select a site collection by clicking the checkbox in front of it, and then click Properties in the Ribbon. A dialog will pop up that shows you more details, such as how much storage the site collection is using (I have 39MB here, available are 1000MB), and how many resources are used and available (0 and 300 respectively here in my case).
Monitoring Service Health
The last thing to have a look at is which services of Office 365 experienced issues or outages recently. Click on Service Health in the Admin Portal, and you will see a table showing different services and their status during the past few days.
If there was an interruption, or generally if additional information is available, you can click on the corresponding icon to see more details:
If you want to know if any maintenance is planned for the next few weeks, click on Planned Maintenance to see the list:
Great article… thx Andreas