Hangouts Chat audit log

Track users conversation and room activity
If you have Drive Enterprise edition, upgrade to G Suite Enterprise to get this service.

As an administrator, you can track conversation and discussion activity in your organization using the Hangouts Chat audit log. For example, you can see when a user starts a direct message or creates a room.

If you have history turned off, you won't see data for users who send direct messages. To check your settings, see Turn history on or off.


Note: Occasionally some Hangouts Chat activity isn't logged as expected. We're working to resolve this issue and will update this article when full logging is restored. 

Step 1: Open your Hangouts Chat audit log

  1. Sign in to your Google Admin console.

    Sign in using your administrator account (does not end in @gmail.com).

  2. From the Admin console Home page, go to Reports.

    To see Reports, you might have to click More controls at the bottom.

  3. On the left under Audit, click Hangouts Chat.
  4. (Optional) On the toolbar, click Manage columns Manage columns and select the columns you want to see or hide.
  5. See below for how to interpret and customize log data.

Step 2: Understand Hangouts Chat audit log data

Data you can view
Data Type Description
Event name The action that was logged, such as starting a conversation or creating a room.
Event description Details of the event.
User The name of the user who performed the action.
Date Date and time the event occurred (displayed in your browser's default time zone).

Step 3: Customize and export your audit log data

Filter the audit log data by user or activity

You can narrow your audit log to show specific events or users. For example, find all log events for when a particular user created a conversation.

  1. Open your Chat audit log as shown above.
  2. Click + Add Filter.
  3. Enter or select the criteria for your filter. You can filter on any combination of the data you can view in the log.
  4. (Optional) Click Date range, select a period from the list, or enter a start and end date, and time.
  5. Click Apply.

Filter by organizational unit

You can filter by organizational unit to compare statistics between child organizations in a domain.

  1. Open your audit log as shown above.
  2. At the top, click Organization filter, search for a name or select an organizational unit from the list.
  3. (Optional) Click Date range, select a period from the list, or enter a start and end date, and time.

    Note: You can filter by any event at + Add a filter , and then filter the results by Organization filter or Date range.

  4. Click Apply.

You can only filter the current organization hierarchy, even when searching for older data. Data before December 20, 2018 will not appear in the filtered results.

Export your audit log data

You can export your audit log data to Google Sheets or download it to a CSV file.

  1. Open your audit log as shown above.
  2. (Optional) To change the data to include in your export, click Manage columns Manage columns, select or remove the columns that you want to export, and click Save.
  3. Click Download Download.
  4. Under Select columns, click Currently selected columns or All columns.
  5. Under Select format, click Google Sheets or Comma-separated values (.csv).
  6. Click Download.

You can export up to 210,000 cells. The maximum number of rows depends on the number of columns you select. Audit logs to Sheets are limited to 10,000 rows, while CSV exports can include up to 500,000 rows.

How old is the data I'm seeing?

For details on exactly when data becomes available and how long it's retained, see Data retention and lag times.

Step 4: Set up email alerts

You can track user activities by setting up email alerts.

  1. Open your audit log as shown above.
  2. Click + Add Filter.
  3. Enter or select the criteria for your filter.

    To set up an alert, you can filter on any combination of the data you can view in the log except date and time range.

  4. Click Create Alert and enter a name for the alert.
  5. At Recipients, click Turn on Turn on to send the alert to a super administrator account.
  6. Enter the email addresses of any other alert recipients.Enter the email addresses of any other email alert recipients.
  7. Click Create.

To edit your custom alerts, refer to Administrator email alerts.

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