How to Track Admin Activity With the Google Workspace Admin Audit Log

Quick and easy-to-follow guide for Google Workspace administrators

What is the Admin Audit Log feature in Google Workspace

The Admin audit log records and shows all actions performed by admins in the Admin console.

When to use the Admin Audit Log

When you want to see the time and date when a specific action took place in the Admin console
When you want to investigate any recent admin activity

Admin Audit Log data availability and retention

After an action is performed, the log updates and reflects it quite fast, almost in real-time, but can take up to a few minutes.
There’s a small chance that logs for some events will be delayed beyond a few minutes. In very rare cases, events may not be reported at all.
The Admin audit log shows you all actions performed by admins in the Admin console in the past 180 days.
You can’t look back any further than that, as data older than 180 days gets permanently removed from the log.

How to use the Google Workspace Admin Audit Log step-by-step with images

Step 1

Go to the Admin console https://admin.google.com and in the menu on the left, click Reporting > Audit > Admin.

Step 2

Configuring the Admin Audit Log to show what you need

By default, you will see all admin actions sorted chronologically from newest to oldest, under Event Name, Event Description, and the other columns.

You can narrow down the scope of the filter to find something specific by clicking the Add a filter option on the left.

Step 3

Clicking Add a filter lets you only display events related to the type of thing you want to search. In the Admin log, you can filter by Event name, User name, and Admin name.

Event is the type of event you are looking for, such as User Creation, User Deletion, Gmail Setting Change, Drive Setting Change, and more.
User email is the email address or name of a user involved in the event.
Actor is the email address or name of the admin who performed the event.

Step 4

There are more filters on the top right.

Clicking the Organizational unit filter allows you to only view events related to users in a specific OU.

Step 5

Clicking the Group filter on the top right allows you to only view events related to users in specific Google Groups that you have set as filtering groups. To set a group as a filtering group, you can click the Filtering groups link.

Step 6

The Date range filter lets you display events that occurred in a specific time frame. Again, please note that it’s impossible to go further than the last 6 months.

Step 7

The gear icon Manage columns on the right lets you add or remove columns that show info in the report.

Step 8

You can also rearrange them by clicking and holding the left mouse button on the left of the column name and dragging it up or down.

Step 9

Exporting Admin Audit Log data

The Download icon is for exporting data from the audit log.

Step 10

You can export to a Google Sheets file or a .csv file, and you can export All columns or only the Currently selected columns.

Unless you prefer or need .csv for a specific reason, you should select Google Sheets.

Step 11

When the export is ready, you’ll be able to see it under the Tasks icon on the top right. Click Open in Google Sheets to view the report in a spreadsheet.

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