Nextcloud Activities Filter

ℹ️ Support
1

Hey guys!

How can I filter a search in Nextcloud Activities?

I need to fetch information about activities performed by specific users and on specific dates.

2

Hi, I was not able to do this out of the box and need this a lot.
What I have ended up is a script that would take the information from the activities database and make an excel file from it where you can sort and filter everything easy.

As far as I remember the only thing that confused me was that it took only a very small amount of records from there, 10 or 15, not the whole database

3

As I understand it, the main purpose of the Activities app is to send notifications about specific events to users, and it’s not at all well suited for auditing user activity by an administrator. For the latter, there is the Admin Audit Log, which is much more flexible as it can be used in conjunction with standard log management solutions, and it also logs many more events than the Activities app does.

https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/configuration_server/logging_configuration.html#admin-audit-log-optional

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4

Thank you for the idea of using log management tools and admin audit log. As for the purpose of Activities app - it looks to me like it was intended to keep users aware of what is going on with the resources they have access to. And those tools are pretty good at it. The only thing missing is the way to filter this data to inquire about specific things related to specific folders, users, timeframes when you do not need to catch up generally, but rather try to investigate what was happening

5

The audit logfile is in json format, which you can filter with jq.

Read → this ← or → this ← for some inspiration.

Much and good luck,
ernolf

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