Recent activity

Recent activity is a calm, readable feed of what's been happening across your school over the last couple of weeks — the kind of thing to skim over morning coffee to stay oriented. It reads the same information as the Logs area, but tells it as a story in plain sentences rather than a technical event stream.

You'll find it in the sidebar under Admin → Recent activity. In MAT overview it's under Platforms and covers every school you administer. It needs the View logs & audit trail permission, so admins on reduced access won't see it.

What it shows

• A strip of four counts for the period you've chosen: accounts created, suspended, group changes, and that need a look (events that failed).
• A day-by-day feed (Today / Yesterday / earlier) of plain past-tense sentences:
  • "Zoya Khan was added to Year 9 Science and 3 other groups"
  • "Amir Patel was given an account"
  • "Tom Reed was removed from 8B Maths"
• The orphan suspension story, told as one thread. When an admin marks a stale Google account for suspension on the End of year page (see Stale orphan review) and the process later suspends it, the feed shows a single two-step story — "…was marked for suspension, then suspended by the end-of-term process" — with both dates, so you see the process playing out rather than two disconnected events. An account marked but not yet actioned shows as an open thread ("…was marked for suspension — awaiting the suspension process"). A failed one reads "…but the suspension didn't complete". The suspended count in the strip counts these suspensions; it isn't a count of everyone suspended as a leaver.
• Failed changes are retold calmly — "couldn't be added to Year 9 Science", "had a Classroom change that didn't go through" — rather than as raw errors.

Similar changes are grouped sensibly — many groups added to one person collapse to "…and 3 other groups" (select Show all N to see them all) — so it reads as activity, not a wall of rows. The feed shows 200 items at a time; select Show more (N older) at the bottom for the rest.

Filtering

• Source — narrow to a single sync source: All activity, MIS, Google Workspace, Microsoft Entra, Active Directory or Apple School Manager. Only the platforms your school actually uses are offered (MIS is always there). Handy for "what has Google been doing this week?" versus "what changed in the MIS?"
• Period — Last 7 days, Last 2 weeks (the default) or Last 30 days.
• Refresh — reloads the feed now. The page keeps a copy for about five minutes, so a very recent change can take a moment to appear without it.

Activity vs Logs

Recent activity is the overview; the Logs page is the detail. When you need the exact error, the raw payload, or to triage a specific failure, open Logs (there's a link at the foot of the feed). Recent activity is for staying oriented; Logs is for digging in.

Everything here is read-only — it reports what happened, it doesn't change anything.

If the feed says All quiet (No activity in this period for the selected source), widen the Period or choose a different Source.

Related

• Check sync status and read logs
• How the sync engine works