Search the audit log for events in Microsoft Teams

• 4/29/2021
• 14 minutes to read
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• Applies to:

  Microsoft Teams

The audit log can help you investigate specific activities across Microsoft 365 services. For Microsoft Teams, here are some of the activities that are audited:

• Team creation
• Team deletion
• Added channel
• Changed setting

For a complete list of Teams activities that are audited, see Teams activities and Shifts in Teams activities (in preview).

Turn on auditing in Teams

Before you can look at audit data, you have to first turn on auditing in the Security & Compliance Center. For help with turning on auditing, read Turn audit log search on or off.

Retrieve Teams data from the audit log

1. To retrieve audit logs, go to the Security & Compliance Center. Under Search, select Audit log search.

2. Use Search to filter by the activities, dates, and users you want to audit.

3. Export your results to Excel for further analysis.

The length of time that an audit record is retained and searchable in the audit log depends on your Microsoft 365 or Office 365 subscription, and specifically the type of license that's assigned to users. To learn more, see the Security & Compliance Center service description.

Tips for searching the audit log

Here are tips for searching for Teams activities in the audit log.

• You can select specific activities to search for by clicking the activity name. Or you can search for all activities in a group (such as File and folder activities) by clicking the group name. If an activity is selected, you can click it to cancel the selection. You can also use the search box to display the activities that contain the keyword that you type.

  

• To display events for activities run using cmdlets, select Show results for all activities in the Activities list. If you know the name of the operation for these activities, search for all activities, and then filter the results by typing the name of the operation in the box in the Activity column. To learn more, see Step 3: Filter the search results.

• To clear the current search criteria, click Clear. The date range returns to the default of the last seven days. You can also click Clear all to show results for all activities to cancel all selected activities.

• If 5,000 results are found, you can probably assume that there are more than 5,000 events that met the search criteria. You can refine the search criteria and rerun the search to return fewer results, or you can export all the search results by selecting Export results > Download all results.

Check out this video for using audio log search. Join Ansuman Acharya, a program manager for Teams, as he demonstrates how to do an audit log search for Teams.

Use Cloud App Security to set activity policies

Using Microsoft Cloud App Security integration, you can set activity policies to enforce a wide range of automated processes using the app provider's APIs. These policies enable you to monitor specific activities carried out by various users, or follow unexpectedly high rates of one certain type of activity.

After you set an activity detection policy, it starts to generate alerts. Alerts are only generated on activities that occur after you create the policy. Here's some example scenarios for how you can use activity policies in Cloud App Security to monitor Teams activities.

External user scenario

One scenario you might want to keep an eye on, from a business perspective, is the addition of external users to your Teams environment. If external users are enabled, monitoring their presence is a good idea. You can use Cloud App Security to identify potential threats.

The screenshot of this policy to monitor adding external users allows you to name the policy, set the severity according to your business needs, set it as (in this case) a single activity, and then establish the parameters that will specifically monitor only the addition of non-internal users, and limit this activity to Teams.

The results from this policy can be viewed in the activity log:

Here you can review matches to the policy you've set, and make any adjustments as needed, or export the results to use elsewhere.

Mass delete scenario

As mentioned earlier, you can monitor deletion scenarios. It's possible to create a policy that would monitor mass deletion of Teams sites. In this example, an alert-based policy is set up to detect mass deletion of teams in a span of 30 minutes.

As the screenshot shows, you can set many different parameters for this policy to monitor Teams deletions, including severity, single or repeated action, and parameters limiting this to Teams and site deletion. This can be done independently of a template, or you may have a template created to base this policy on, depending on your organizational needs.

After you establish a policy that works for your business, you can review the results in the activity log as events are triggered:

You can filter down to the policy you've set to see the results of that policy. If the results you're getting in the activity log are not satisfactory (maybe you're seeing lots of results, or nothing at all), this may help you to fine-tune the query to make it more relevant to what you need it to do.

Alert and governance scenario

You can set alerts and send emails to admins and other users when an activity policy is triggered. You can set automated governance actions such as suspending a user or making a user to sign in again in an automated way. This example shows how a user account can be suspended when an activity policy is triggered and determines a user deleted two or more teams in 30 minutes.

Use Cloud App Security to set anomaly detection policies

Anomaly detection policies in Cloud App Security provide out-of-the-box user and entity behavioral analytics (UEBA) and machine learning (ML) so that you can immediately run advanced threat detection across your cloud environment. Because they're automatically enabled, the new anomaly detection policies provide immediate results by providing immediate detections, targeting numerous behavioral anomalies across your users and the machines and devices connected to your network. Additionally, the new policies expose more data from the Cloud App Security detection engine, to help you speed up the investigation process and contain ongoing threats.

We're working to integrate Teams events into anomaly detection policies. For now, you can set up anomaly detection policies for other Office products and take action items on users who match those policies.

Teams activities

Here's a list of all events that are logged for user and admin activities in Teams in the Microsoft 365 audit log. The table includes the friendly name that's displayed in the Activities column and the name of the corresponding operation that appears in the detailed information of an audit record and in the CSV file when you export the search results.

Shifts in Teams activities

(in preview)

If your organization is using the Shifts app in Teams, you can search the audit log for activities related to the Shifts app. Here's a list of all events that are logged for Shifts activities in Teams in the Microsoft 365 audit log.

Office 365 Management Activity API

You can use the Office 365 Management Activity API to retrieve information about Teams events. To learn more about the Management Activity API schema for Teams, see Teams schema.

Attribution in Teams audit logs

Membership changes to Teams (such as users added or deleted) made through Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), Microsoft 365 admin portal, or Microsoft 365 Groups Graph API will appear in Teams audit messages and in the General channel with an attribution to an existing owner of the team, and not to the actual initiator of the action. In these scenarios, consult Azure AD or Microsoft 365 Group audit logs to see the relevant information.

Related topics

• Search the audit log in the Microsoft 365 compliance center