How to read detailed activity logs

[snissen]

I am trying to troubleshoot a problem reported by my users, and am looking at a Dropbox for Business detailed activity log. It immediately raises about a million questions, about how to parse and interpret the log. Is there a written guide anywhere that explains this? Surely someone has some notes on things like:

• Most of what you want is in the Info field, which you're going to have to split on colons, commas, brackets, and braces (each of which delineates ... what?).
• The Info field starts with a WHATISIT? field that is one of these in double quotes: target_users, host_id, member_ids, file_obj_id, file_name, ...
• Specific things are referred to by their _id fields, which you can translate into object names by ....?

[Jay]

Hi there, thanks for your query about the activity logs.

Currently there isn’t any official documentation about how to read the information in the logs, or to output it in a specific format.

Depending on the issue though, we might be able to assist with what to look for in the logs. Could you let us know more details about this matter?

Thanks in advance!

[snissen]

In reading Help after searching on "activity log", there's a reference to another article on "activities", but the link leads nowhere. That's exactly the kind of information I'm seeking: what are all the activities and what do they mean?

As for my specific case, I've opened an incident with support, who has me searching the activity log for an activity of "Changed sync default", of which there are none.

This would be a really useful technical article for us administrators.

[Walter · Accepted solution]

Hey there @snissen - how are you today?

Sorry to be jumping in on this - I just wanted to add my two cents to this - I hope you don't mind. If you weren't able to get a result for the "Changed sync default" option then there's nothing to be shown probably ( you can try another browser to double check this and exlcude browser specific issues). 

I don't know if this helps but @Jay has already posted a thorough guide about the Activity Log in this thread - you can always refer to it for more context. 

Thanks for using Dropbox and have a lovely day!