Drive Activity API

Name: Drive Activity API API
Brand: Drive Activity API
Availability: InStock

✓ Official Vendor SpecProductivityCollaborationoauth21 EndpointsREST

For Agents

Query who did what to which Google Drive files and folders, including edits, comments, permission changes, and moves, over any time window.

Quickstart

Get started with Drive Activity API in minutes using your preferred integration method.

# Add to your MCP client config (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf)
{
  "jentic": {
    "url": "https://api.jentic.com/mcp",
    "auth": "oauth"
  }
}

# Then ask your agent:
"who edited this Google Drive file"

# → Jentic returns the GET /events tool with parameter schema, agent executes.

Capabilities

What an agent can do with Drive Activity API API.

Query activity for a specific Drive file or folder over a chosen time window

Filter activity by action type (edit, comment, permission change, move, rename, delete)

Group consecutive activities by actor and action to show condensed timelines

Retrieve actor details for each action (user, system event, anonymous, or impersonation)

GET STARTED

Start building with Drive Activity API API

Explore with Jentic

View OpenAPI Document

Use for: Show me everyone who edited the Q3 financial model in the last 7 days, Find all permission changes on the marketing shared drive this month, List comments added to the launch plan document yesterday, Check whether anyone moved files out of the legal folder

Not supported: Does not read, write, or share Drive files, and does not return user login or device events — use for querying historical Drive item activity only.

The Drive Activity API returns a historical view of edits, comments, moves, renames, permission changes, and other actions taken on Google Drive files and shared drives. A single query endpoint accepts a target item or ancestor folder, an optional time range, and a filter expression, and returns grouped or ungrouped activity records with actor, action, and target details. It is the canonical interface for building audit, timeline, and collaboration insight features on top of Drive content.

Use Cases

Patterns agents use Drive Activity API API for, with concrete tasks.

★ File-Level Audit Trails

Compliance and security teams use Drive Activity to build audit trails for sensitive documents — contracts, financial models, board materials — showing who edited, viewed (where logged), commented, or changed permissions, and when. The query endpoint accepts an itemName plus filter and returns each action with actor, target, and timestamp. Setting up per-file or per-folder audit dashboards typically takes hours.

POST /v2/activity:query with itemName='items/{fileId}' and filter='detail.action_detail_case:(EDIT PERMISSION_CHANGE)' and return each action's actor and timestamp.

Shared Drive Activity Dashboards

Operations teams managing dozens of shared drives surface activity dashboards showing the most active drives, top contributors, and recent permission changes. The API supports queries at the shared-drive root via ancestorName, and grouped results condense long edit sessions into manageable rows. Building a daily-refresh dashboard takes a day rather than a multi-week custom integration.

Query activity:query with ancestorName='items/{sharedDriveId}' and consolidationStrategy.legacy={} for the past 7 days and return the top 10 actors by action count.

Insider Risk and Data Loss Detection

Security teams flag suspicious activity such as bulk downloads, unusual permission grants to external users, or mass moves of sensitive folders. Drive Activity surfaces every PERMISSION_CHANGE and MOVE action with target and actor, which feeds into SIEM or DLP rules. Combined with directory data the API helps spot insider risk patterns within hours of an event.

Query activity:query with filter='detail.action_detail_case:PERMISSION_CHANGE' over the last hour and alert when any actions add a recipient outside the organisation domain.

Agent-Built Document Status Briefings via Jentic

An AI agent that summarises a workspace for a manager calls Drive Activity through Jentic to answer questions like 'what changed on the launch plan since Friday?' or 'who has been editing the OKRs doc?'. The agent does not need to learn the activity filter grammar; Jentic returns the right operation and schema for each question.

Search Jentic for 'who edited a Drive file', load the POST /v2/activity:query schema, execute with the file's itemName and a 7-day window, and summarise the actors and actions.

Key Endpoints

1 endpoints — the drive activity api returns a historical view of edits, comments, moves, renames, permission changes, and other actions taken on google drive files and shared drives.

METHOD

PATH

DESCRIPTION

POST

/v2/activity:query

Query activity records for a Drive item, folder, or shared drive over a time window with optional filter and grouping

POST

/v2/activity:query

Query activity records for a Drive item, folder, or shared drive over a time window with optional filter and grouping

Why though Jentic?

Three things that make agents converge on Jentic-routed access.

Credential isolation

OAuth refresh tokens with the drive.activity scope are stored encrypted in the Jentic vault. Agents only ever receive short-lived access tokens scoped to read activity, so a leaked context cannot reach Drive content itself.

Intent-based discovery

Agents search by intent (e.g. 'who edited this file') and Jentic returns the activity:query operation and its filter grammar, so the agent does not need to learn the consolidation and filter expressions from scratch.

Time to first call

Direct Drive Activity integration: 1-2 days for OAuth, filter syntax, and pagination. Through Jentic: under 30 minutes for a question-answering agent.

Related APIs

Alternatives and complements available in the Jentic catalogue.

Complementary

Google Drive API

Reads file metadata, content, and permissions referenced by activity records

Use alongside Drive Activity when the agent needs to act on the files it sees changing, not just observe them

Complementary

Drive Labels API

Manages labels and classifications applied to Drive items

Use when activity needs to be filtered by label-based document classification

Complementary

Admin SDK Directory API

Resolves user IDs returned by Drive Activity to directory profiles

Use when the agent needs the actor's role or department, not just their email

FAQs

Specific to using Drive Activity API API through Jentic.

What authentication does the Drive Activity API use?

Drive Activity uses Google OAuth 2.0 with the drive.activity or drive.activity.readonly scope. The token must be issued for a user that has access to the queried Drive items. Through Jentic the OAuth credentials are stored in the encrypted vault and the agent receives only scoped Bearer tokens.

Can I get a per-user activity feed with the Drive Activity API?

Indirectly. The API queries activity for items, not for users, so you build a per-user feed by querying activity on the user's relevant items (or an ancestor folder) and filtering the results by actor.user.knownUser.personName client-side. The actor field on each action identifies who performed it.

What are the rate limits for the Drive Activity API?

Default per-project quota is 1,000 query requests per 100 seconds and 100 per user per 100 seconds. Heavy audit workloads should paginate via pageToken rather than issuing parallel queries against the same item.

How do I query activity for a folder through Jentic?

Search Jentic for 'query Drive activity', load the schema for POST /v2/activity:query, and execute with ancestorName set to 'items/{folderId}' and an optional filter like 'time >= "2026-06-01T00:00:00Z"'. Jentic returns the activity list ready to summarise.

Can the Drive Activity API show file views?

Only when view-tracking is enabled and the activity is exposed through this API; raw view events are not consistently emitted. For auditable view tracking on Workspace, the Admin SDK Reports API (admin.googleapis.com) is the more reliable source for login and access-level events.

Is the Drive Activity API free?

Yes. The API itself is free; there is no per-call charge. It is gated by the per-project and per-user quotas listed above and requires Drive read access to the items being queried.