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Use cases → Admin and governance

Delegated review of document access logs across tenants

How to audit who accessed critical Drive files using domain-wide delegation, without relying on each admin to pull their own logs.

Who it is forSecurity operations or compliance teams responsible for monitoring file access.
APIsAdmin SDK, Drive API
Typical scopesadmin.reports.audit.readonly, drive.readonly

The problem

Manually checking Drive access logs per domain is slow, inconsistent, and usually gets skipped until after an incident. Centralising log review via delegation reduces response time and keeps oversight continuous.

How it works

  1. Delegate the admin.reports.audit.readonly scope to your service account in each tenant.
  2. Pull Drive audit logs via the Reports API, filtering for events like VIEW or DOWNLOAD.
  3. Correlate log entries with file metadata from the Drive API for context.
  4. Schedule regular exports and flag anomalies for review.

What changes

Access review becomes routine and cross-tenant, with a single workflow able to surface suspicious document access regardless of domain.

The trap in this one. The Reports API has a lag of several minutes to hours before access events appear. If you attempt to poll for recent access within seconds of a critical event, the log will show nothing—leading to false negatives in your monitoring. Relying on near-real-time detection is not viable; always account for log propagation delays in your alerting and review windows.

Questions people ask

Can I get real-time alerts on document access?

No—there is an unavoidable delay in the Reports API. For true real-time, you would need to build event-driven monitoring into the files themselves, which is not practical at scale.

Is the Drive API itself enough for auditing?

No—the Drive API does not expose access logs. You must use the Admin SDK Reports API with the correct audit scope.

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

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