domainwidedelegation.comStart free

Use cases → Reporting and data

Report on user activity patterns across Workspace

Aggregate and analyse user activity events using a delegated service account to spot trends, anomalies, and compliance issues across multiple users.

Who it is forInfrastructure and security teams monitoring usage and compliance across an organisation.
APIsAdmin SDK
Typical scopesadmin.reports.audit.readonly

The problem

Spotting risky or unusual behaviour means looking at patterns, not single events. The Admin SDK's Reports API exposes audit logs, but only at user or event-category granularity, and the data is spread across many paginated responses. Real analysis means stitching this together reliably.

How it works

  1. Delegate to a service account with audit read access via domain-wide delegation.
  2. Paginate through the Admin SDK Reports API for each user and relevant event category.
  3. Normalise timestamps and correlate events by user and activity type.
  4. Aggregate results centrally for trend analysis and alerting.

What changes

You get a consolidated view of how users interact with Workspace, enabling detection of suspicious trends or policy violations.

The trap in this one. The Reports API returns audit events with a propagation delay that can exceed several hours, especially for high-volume domains. If you run your reporting job on a fixed schedule (e.g. hourly), you will miss late-arriving events unless you re-scan overlapping time windows. This leads to undercounting and false negatives in trend reports unless you explicitly handle delayed data.

Watch it explained

“Enabling Extension Request Workflow (Setting up App Requests - Managing Apps with Workspace)” — AppsEDU 🤓 Google Workspace tech experts on YouTube. Third-party video, included because it covers this ground well. We are not affiliated with the channel.

Questions people ask

How far back should I query to avoid missing delayed events?

Always include at least the previous 24 hours in your query window and deduplicate by event ID to catch late-arriving data.

Does the Reports API provide real-time activity data?

No, the data is delayed and can be incomplete for recent activity. Always account for lag in your reporting logic.

Want this built?

This is a pattern we run in production. We will set up the delegation and build this on top of it — $500 per hour, most of it working the same day.

Talk to us Or read the setup guide

Related use cases

Report Drive storage usage per organisational unit

Aggregate and report Google Drive storage usage for each organisational unit using a delegated service account with Admin SDK access.

Report on meeting room usage with a service account

Extract room booking data from multiple calendars to analyse real utilisation, not just scheduled events.

Keep team roster sheets synced with Directory

Automatically update shared Sheets with live user details from Directory, so teams always see the current staff list.