Google Drive Activity API
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For Agents
Query who did what to which Google Drive files and folders, including edits, comments, permission changes, and moves, over any time window.
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.
Install Jentic One Beta
Connect the Drive Activity API to your agent
Jentic One is a self-hosted execution layer for AI agents. It lets your agent call the Drive Activity API, or any other public or private API you need. You set the rules, the agent never sees your credentials, and every call is logged.
Two steps, two machines. Install the instance in a safe environment, then register your agent from wherever it runs.
1
Step 1: Jentic One Host machine
# On the machine that will host your Jentic One instance:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jentic/jentic-one/main/tools/install.sh | sh2
Step 2: Agent machine
# On the machine where your agent runs (keep this separate from the instance):
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jentic/jentic-one/main/tools/install.sh | sh
jentic register # connects your agent to your Jentic One instanceJentic One is in public beta. The setup above keeps your agent separate from the instance, which is what you want before using real credentials: an agent running as the same OS user as Jentic One can read its stored keys directly. Just evaluating? A single local install is fine to start. See the secure deployment guide for the tiers.
Capabilities
What an agent can do with Drive Activity 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)
Page through long activity histories using pageToken and pageSize
Query activity at the shared drive or ancestor folder level for organisation-wide audits
Use Cases
Patterns agents use Drive Activity 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 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.
FAQs
Specific to using Drive Activity 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.
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