Monitoring Reports

Data-driven decisions can make a big difference in the competitiveness of a team. With this in mind, G Suite's business solutions include Reports that allows administrators to track almost everything that happens within the domain.

G Suite Reports are very powerful tools that concentrate years of careful thought and experience from Google, and are available to you as an administrator. The Reports feature was carefully designed and deeply integrated into G Suite services so you can always have accurate and updated information about your users.

Keep in mind that having access to detailed information only gets you so far. Imagine having a desk full of papers containing daily reports from the last five years and you need to compile the information there into a report that contains all the relevant information for your next meeting. Choosing the right metrics...

Understanding Highlights reports

G Suite Highlights report allows you to take a quick glance at usage data for the different parts of G Suite, file sharing activities, the number of users in the domain, how much storage is being used, monitoring external app usage, and the number of users enrolled in 2-Step Verification.

Let's start by exploring the USER STATUS Highlights report.

Exploring USER STATUS Highlights

G Suite charges for each active account in the domain, so as an administrator, it's important for you to track the number of accounts in the domain as well as their individual statuses:

The G Suite USER STATUS Highlights report is on the top right of your screen, and it allows you to monitor the following...

Understanding Apps reports

G Suite comes with many productivity applications to facilitate your team's work every day. As an administrator, you can keep track of how much each part of G Suite is being used so that you can prioritize the administration of the most-used parts, as well as help your users understand how they can make the most out of the least-used services.

Accounts

Administering accounts is a big part of your duties as an administrator. This is particularly important in large teams since the amount billed every month depends on the amount of user accounts.

You can see the following reports in this section:

• 2-Step verification enrollment: The number of users that have already enrolled in the 2-Step verification...

Understanding the Mobile Devices report

G Suite not only works great on mobile devices, but it also allows administrators to keep detailed track of the kind of devices being used by members of the organization thanks to eight different reports.

To simplify things, all reports comes can be analyzed in two aggregations:

• 7DA: These are reports that show activity over seven days
• 30DA: These are reports that show activity over 30 days

G Suite divides Mobile Devices reports into four categories:

• Managed Devices: Here you can track access using any managed device.
• Managed Users: This keeps track of users who sync their accounts to a mobile device:

• Managed Android Devices: Here you can track the number of Android devices grouped by Android version. This allows you to keep track of the popularity of each Android version in the organization.
• Managed iOS Devices: Here you can track...

Understanding the Users report

The Users report gives administrators the ability to focus on a particular user or a particular activity, as well as to compare users by selecting different metrics and filters.

Above the account activity report, you will see a dynamic timeline that shows your users' activity through time; this can give you many insights into your team's activities. Click on the name of the metric to see a list with all the available options:

Below the timeline, you will see a dynamic table with aggregate information that will allow you to easily compare your users:

If you click on a column name, the chart will show the timeline for that metric, and you can select the columns on display by clicking on the Select columns icon (the icon that looks like three gray lines) and choosing the metrics you are looking for.

Since there are so many metrics that...

Understanding audit logs

Audit logs keep detailed records of key events in the system, and are designed so you can easily find what you are looking for when you need to know all the details about an event or series of events.

All logs are classified in 14 different categories, and each one keeps different parameters about the events it stores. By default, all logs will be showing the parameters that are considered most commonly used, but you can customize to show additional parameters when available and hide the ones you might not be interested in at that moment.

The email log search is the only one that has no selectable columns, but instead has several search fields to make it easier to find exactly what you need.

Let's explore what each of these categories can show us, as well as which column each one has enabled by default, and which ones we need to enable if we need...

Managing alerts

Reports are an amazing tool for identifying trends, and searching logs allows you to trace specific events, but they both depend on you spending time finding relevant information.

G Suite Alerts provide email notifications when certain events take place. As an administrator, you can choose for which events you wish to be notified immediately.

The alert screen has three columns:

• Alert name: This is a short description of the event.
• Email recipients: Which group will be notified of this event.
• Status: Indicates whether the event is enabled or disabled. To change the status of an event, just click on the toggle slider:

At the moment of writing this, there are 21 different alerts to choose from. Let's explore them so you can choose which ones you need on your domains:

• Drive settings changed: Sends a message when an administrator changes the default Drive...

Summary

Congratulations for finishing this chapter! You have just learned how to monitor an entire domain, regardless of how many users it may have.

You are now capable of quickly analyzing how your users interact with G Suite; you can measure the popularity of a service, or the productivity of a team or individual with the Apps usage activity Highlights report.

Sharing is a basic need for collaboration, and with the File sharing activity Highlights report, you can keep track of how information is moving and track down any suspicious activity using the Audit logs.

We learned how to track the way users are using all the different G Suite main components thanks to the many Apps reports; you can see all relevant activity through dynamic reports with the most relevant metrics about Accounts, App Maker, Classroom, Cloud Search, Drive, Gmail, Google+, and Hangouts.

Sometimes you want...

Further reading

• Alert center for G Suite generally available to help identify security threats (https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2018/10/g-suite-alert-center-generally-available.html), G Suite Updates, October 10, 2018
• Monitor usage and security with reports (https://support.google.com/a/answer/6000239?hl=en&ref_topic=6046029)
• Understanding audit logs (https://support.google.com/a/topic/9027054)