Microsoft Introduces New Teams App Usage Report

New Report Helps Admins Understand Apps Usage

Without any notification in the Office 365 Message Center, the Teams developers have introduced a new App usage report in the Reports section of the Teams admin center.

App management has been steadily improved in Teams over the last year or so, with app permissions policies and app setup policies added in 2019 and a new app management model earlier this year. However, there’s never been great visibility about what usage the hundreds of available apps actually get, which means that admins have to figure out what’s happening. You can create a report using PowerShell and the Graph to discover what apps are installed as channel tabs, but that doesn’t tell you if any of the tab-connected apps are used.

Teams Usage Reports

Microsoft added the Analytics and Reports section to the Teams admin center in 2019 and has since grown the set of available reports to:

• Apps usage
• PSTN blocked users
• PSTN and SMS minute pools (preview)
• PSTN and SMS usage (preview)
• Teams device usage
• Teams live event usage
• Teams usage
• Teams user activity

Most of the reports are available for the last 7, 30, or 90 days, while the PSTN and SMS usage report is available for the last 7 or 28 days or a custom range (within the last 28 days). The Teams device and user activity information is available in the Reports section of the Microsoft 365 admin center, albeit in a different format. The data all comes from the same place: the Microsoft Graph.

Teams App Usage Report

The data available for app usage (Figure 1) is useful for understanding the level of use apps get across the tenant. If you spend time creating app setup policies to place apps in the navigation bar, you’d like to know that people are using the selected apps, and you can find this information out here. Likewise, if you see an app in heavy use that isn’t shown in the navigation pane, perhaps it’s time to include it there.

Unfortunately, you might have to do more digging than you should to get to the information. This is because the grid of apps under the graph can only be sorted by app name, which means that you can’t do something like sort the apps by heaviest usage.

Analyzing App Usage Data

To perform further analysis, you can export the data to Excel (a CSV file). In Figure 2 we can see that the heaviest used app is one called Teams (channel conversations) followed by Activity (the feed), Planner, and Files (SharePoint). What you might be surprised by here is that mainline Teams components show up as apps, but that’s the way Teams works.

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