Check activity and events logs to understand your team and their workflows. Learn how you can build reports and quickly filter activity by content or people to visualize everything that happens in your team.
The Dropbox team activity log
A major value proposition for Dropbox as an enterprise content-based collaboration platform is the ability to know who is doing what with which content. This allows companies to understand their workflows and their data.
Dropbox business customers have access to the activity log, which provides an easy way to view what's going on with your team. For example, let's say you are a distributor of automotive accessories, and you need to use Dropbox to distribute brochures and technical documentation to your regional reps. They will use that information to educate themselves but also to distribute that to their resellers. As the marketing manager, you might want to understand if your documentation is helping sales and if your investment in enablement materials is justified.
With the activity log, you can visualize everything that happens in your Dropbox team. It's right there in the main menu of the admin console. When you open the activity log page, you are presented with a set of filters on the top. Of course, when a team really starts to use Dropbox, the activity log will be very large. There will be hundreds of thousands of entries. And therefore, you need to be able to quickly find the information you want through the use of filters.
You will also see a quick view of the latest activity in the team. You can filter activities by date, by people involved, by content like a filename, and by activity type. If you click on "activity," you will see the list of available activity types. There are over four hundred activity types, and they are organized in categories.
If you know exactly which activity type you are looking for, you can select it. Or if you don't know exactly, you can just select a category. Let's say, for example, you want to see everything that's going on regarding sharing. So eighty-two activities will be added to the list. Next, you probably will want to filter by date. This is just what happened today. Let's see. I want to look at everything that happened throughout the month.
For each activity, and they're ordered in the most recent will be showing up first. For each activity, you will see the date, which is a timestamp, date and time, a member, an activity type, and then the object related to that activity, a category, the device accessing that content, and a location. You can also customize the view by removing some fields like category and access from and adding new ones like IP address participants.
Once you're satisfied with the view, like we played with the filters here, and you're seeing the list you wanted to see, you can create a report. By clicking "create a report," you can select, if you are excluding the activities and file operations. I'm not going to exclude because I want to see everything related to sharing, and then I'm going to create a report. In this case, an email will be sent to me when that report is completed.
Once that report is created, it will be placed in a folder that only the admin has access to called Dropbox Business Reports. Let's take a look at mine. So I'm the admin. I'm going to go and look at my files, and I will find that folder right here. And probably the most recent entry will be the report that was created for me. It is in CSV format, which means that it's a standard that can be read by many tools out there like Excel, Tableau, and other visualization engines.
If you preview the file, you'll notice that the same information is there, but now organized in a spreadsheet format. Super easy to share. Because this folder is only available for me, if I need to share this file or publish it somewhere, I would need to either share the folder or share the file itself. So that's it. This is the activity log.
