Quick answer. Microsoft Teams reporting shows usage and activity — you get it from the Teams admin center (Analytics & reports > Usage reports) and from Microsoft 365 usage reports (Reports > Usage), with third-party tools for deeper or real-time analytics. Built-in reports cover the last 7, 30, 90 or 180 days, refresh within 24–72 hours, and hide user names by default until a Global Administrator turns that setting off.
Most organisations do not have a Teams reporting problem. They have a console problem. The data exists — Microsoft collects an enormous amount of it — but it sits in at least five different places, each with its own date ranges, its own refresh lag, its own permission model and its own idea of what “active user” means.
This guide maps all of it: what each console reports, who can open it, how fresh the numbers are, where the built-in tools stop, and what to add when they do.
What Teams reporting actually covers
It helps to stop thinking about “Teams reports” as one thing. In practice there are four distinct families, and they almost never live in the same place.
Fig. 1. The four families of Microsoft Teams reporting and where each one lives
Usage and adoption answers are people using Teams, and how? — active users, messages, meetings organised, channels, apps installed. This is the Teams admin center and the Microsoft 365 admin center.
Quality and reliability answers why did that call sound terrible? — jitter, packet loss, round-trip time, device and network diagnostics. This is Call analytics (per user) and the Call Quality Dashboard (org-wide).
Events answers how did the town hall go? — attendance, viewing time, registration, recording views. This is the Teams events usage report plus the organiser’s own in-event insights.
Governance, security and compliance answers who has access to what, and who did what? — guest access, membership, retention, audit trails. This is Microsoft Purview, the Microsoft 365 admin center and, increasingly, third-party governance tooling.
A reporting routine that only touches the first family is the most common gap we see. Adoption numbers look healthy right up until the moment someone asks why the quarterly all-hands dropped a third of its audience.
Who is allowed to see Teams reports
This is the part that trips up most people on day one, and it is worth getting right before you go looking for a menu that will not be there.
The two main consoles have different permission models.
| Console | Roles that can view | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Teams admin center — Analytics & reports | Teams Administrator; Skype for Business Administrator; Global Reader | Global Reader sees tenant-level aggregates only — no per-user or per-team data |
| Microsoft 365 admin center — Reports > Usage | Global Administrator, Exchange Administrator, SharePoint Administrator, Teams Administrator, Teams Communications Administrator, Reports Reader, Usage Summary Reports Reader, User Experience Success Manager, AI Administrator | Usage Summary Reports Reader and User Experience Success Manager see aggregates with no user details |
| Call analytics / real-time telemetry | Teams Administrator; Teams Communications Support Specialist; Teams Communications Support Engineer | The two support roles exist specifically so helpdesk staff can troubleshoot without full Teams admin rights |
| Call Quality Dashboard | Roles above, once an admin with “Activate CQD” rights has signed in once for the tenant | First sign-in is a one-time tenant activation step |
Two practical consequences. First, a team owner or channel owner cannot pull organisational reports — no amount of clicking around Teams itself will surface them, because these reports live in admin portals, not in the Teams client. Second, if you only need a helpdesk to diagnose bad calls, give them Teams Communications Support Specialist rather than a broad admin role. Microsoft’s own guidance is to use the role with the fewest permissions that does the job.
Teams admin center reports
This is the primary Teams reporting surface. Sign in at admin.teams.microsoft.com, then in the left navigation choose Analytics & reports > Usage reports, pick a report on the View reports tab, choose a date range, and select Run report.
Pic. 1. The Analytics & reports > Usage reports section in the Microsoft Teams admin center
Most usage reports offer 7, 30, 90 or 180 days. A few are narrower: the events usage report uses 7 or 28 days with an optional custom range, and PSTN Direct Routing uses 7 or 28 days.
The reports you will actually use
| Report | What it answers |
|---|---|
| Teams usage | Active users, active users in teams and channels, active channels, messages, team privacy setting, active guests, external users in shared channels |
| Teams user activity | Per-user channel messages, private chat messages, 1:1 calls, meetings organised and attended, audio/video/screen-share time, last activity date |
| Teams device usage | Which clients people use — Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, ChromeOS, Linux, web |
| Teams app usage | Active users and active teams per app, apps installed, inactive apps, first-party vs third-party vs line-of-business split |
| Teams events usage | Event title and ID, status, start and end time, organiser, co-organisers, presenters, access type, total attendees, registration, recording and recording views, RTMP |
| Teams Premium feature usage | Users reached and meetings using Teams Premium features |
| PSTN usage, minute pools, blocked users | Calling Plans and Direct Routing call detail, minutes consumed against pools, blocked numbers |
| Teams client usage | Desktop client versions across the estate — the fastest way to find machines stuck on an old build |
| Security detections, user reported security submissions | Messages and calls users flagged, plus Teams-side threat detections |
Every table supports Edit columns (or Choose columns) to add and remove fields, filtering, full-screen view, and Export to Excel to pull the underlying rows as CSV. The export is where the real work happens — the on-screen chart is a summary, but the CSV is what you pivot against your HR or department data.
One important retirement. The Teams live event usage report is still documented, but Teams live events retired on 30 June 2026, with already-scheduled events honoured through 28 February 2027. Town halls and webinars are the replacement, and they report through the Teams events usage report instead. If your reporting pack still points at live events, it is measuring a shrinking pool.
If you are new to this console, our Microsoft Teams admin center guide walks through the wider settings and policy areas that sit alongside the reports.
Microsoft 365 admin center usage reports
The Microsoft 365 admin center has its own Teams reports, and they are not the same as the Teams admin center ones. Go to admin.microsoft.com, then Reports > Usage, then select Microsoft Teams (or Microsoft Teams apps).
Pic. 2. Reports > Usage > Microsoft Teams in the Microsoft 365 admin center
Three tabs live here: Team usage, User activity and Device usage, plus a separate Microsoft Teams apps report with App usage and User activity tabs.
The advantage of this console is context. Teams numbers sit next to SharePoint, OneDrive, Exchange, Viva Engage, Forms and Planner, so you can see whether a drop in Teams messages coincides with a rise in email — which is a far more useful signal than a Teams-only chart.
How the two consoles differ
| Aspect | Teams admin center | Microsoft 365 admin center |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Teams only, including PSTN, events, apps, quality | All Microsoft 365 workloads side by side |
| Depth on Teams | Deepest — PSTN, events, client versions, Premium features | Three core Teams tabs plus apps |
| Date ranges | 7 / 30 / 90 / 180 days, some reports 7 / 28 | 7 / 30 / 90 / 180 days |
| Day drill-down | Varies by report | Selecting a single day shows up to 28 days from the current date |
| Audience | Teams admins and voice engineers | Whole-tenant admins, adoption and licensing owners |
A quirk worth knowing on both: selecting a specific day in a chart does not show that day in isolation. The table underneath switches to a rolling window of up to 28 days from the current date — not from the date the report was generated. People misread this constantly and conclude the numbers are wrong.
Real-time and near-real-time Teams reporting
“Real-time Teams reporting” is a genuine capability, but it is narrower than the phrase suggests. Usage reports are never real time. Quality data sometimes is.
Fig. 2. How fresh each Teams reporting source actually is
Real-Time Analytics (meetings in progress). In the Teams admin center, go to Users > Manage users, open a user, then the Meetings & calls tab. Meetings from the past 24 hours appear under Recent meetings, including anything currently running, and you can open a live view of that participant’s audio, video, screen-share, device and network telemetry while the meeting is still happening. This is how you diagnose a keynote that is falling apart during the keynote rather than after it.
Retention differs by licence, which matters if you plan to rely on it:
- Teams Premium and Teams Rooms Pro accounts: real-time telemetry is gathered automatically and kept for seven days.
- Everyone else: real-time telemetry is gathered only while you have the in-progress meeting open in the admin center, and retained for the meeting’s duration.
- Aggregated telemetry is available for all users for 30 days after the meeting ends.
For events, telemetry covers presenters and organisers only — not general attendees.
Pic. 3. Users > Manage users > Meetings & calls
Call Quality Dashboard (near real time). CQD runs on a near-real-time feed: call records typically appear within 30 minutes of a call ending and stay for 12 months, except end-user identifiable information, which is stripped after 28 days. That 28-day EUII window is the single most important CQD planning fact — if you need to attribute a bad call to a named person, you have four weeks, not a year.
Service-level monitoring. Microsoft 365 Teams monitoring samples app launches, chat delivery, meeting joins, quality-of-experience telemetry return rate and UDP stream establishment every 30 minutes, with two weeks of history. It is a health signal, not an analytics tool — but it is the fastest way to tell “Teams is broken” from “Teams is broken for us.”
Organiser-side event insights. During a town hall, organisers and co-organisers see live analytics — viewer count, attendee country or region, a viewing-experience timeline. For attendee-side network performance during large events, the Microsoft eCDN analytics dashboard provides real-time monitoring.
Everything else is batch. Usage reports typically appear within 24 to 72 hours. App usage data for a newly published app can take about five days to show up at all. Copilot reports land within 48 to 72 hours. If someone asks for “today’s Teams adoption numbers,” the honest answer is that today’s numbers do not exist yet.
Call and meeting quality: two tools, two jobs
These two get confused constantly, and picking the wrong one wastes an afternoon.
Call analytics is per-user and per-meeting. You open a specific person, find a specific session, and read the diagnostics. Use it when one named user is complaining.
Call Quality Dashboard is org-wide and aggregate. It surfaces patterns — a subnet with a high rate of dropped calls, a building where Wi-Fi quality falls off a cliff, a client version that correlates with poor audio. Use it when you suspect the problem is bigger than one person.
Pic. 4. A Call Quality Dashboard summary report
Microsoft is explicit that CQD will not give you the root cause of every scenario — it points at areas worth investigating based on trends. It is also explicit that CQD relies on diagnostic telemetry, so it should not be treated as a source of truth for usage counts; slight variances are expected.
Two things make CQD dramatically more useful and almost nobody does them:
- Upload building and endpoint data in the Teams admin center. Without it, CQD shows you subnets. With it, CQD shows you floors and offices, which is what you actually need to fix anything.
- Use the Power BI templates. Microsoft ships downloadable Power BI query templates, including a Quality of Experience Report and dedicated Teams Events Overview and Event Health Details reports. They are updated as new telemetry lands and they save weeks of dashboard building.
For raw access, the Microsoft Graph callRecords API exposes call quality data directly. It is the most flexible option and by far the most work — and it does not contain every field CQD has, with some naming differences between the two.
Where built-in Teams reporting runs out
Native reporting is far better than its reputation, but it has hard edges. Knowing them saves you from promising a stakeholder something the platform cannot deliver.
User names are hidden by default. Since 1 September 2021, Microsoft conceals user, group and site names in usage reports by default. Reports show MD5-hashed strings instead of display names. A Global Administrator can turn this off at Settings > Org settings > Services > Reports by clearing Conceal user, group, and site names in all reports — and that change applies everywhere at once: Microsoft 365 admin center, Teams admin center, Microsoft Graph and Power BI. Revealing identifiable user information is itself a logged event in the Purview audit log.
Pic. 5. The Reports setting under Settings > Org settings > Services in the Microsoft 365 admin center
The window is finite. 180 days is the longest built-in range. Anything longer needs export-and-archive, the Graph reporting APIs, or Microsoft 365 usage analytics in Power BI, which presents monthly data for up to 12 months but only shows user-level detail for the last complete month.
Reports do not answer governance questions. How many teams have no owner? Which teams have been dead for six months? Which guests still have access to a project that closed last year? The usage reports show activity, not state. Answering those questions means Graph, PowerShell or a third-party tool. Our Microsoft Teams security guide and the guest access guide cover the controls behind those questions.
There is no built-in project reporting. Teams reports on Teams — messages, calls, meetings, apps. They say nothing about whether the work happening inside Teams is on schedule. That is a different problem, and it needs a different tool.
Some filters are going away. From March 2026, the Company, City and ProxyAddresses field filters in the Microsoft 365 usage analytics User Activity tab are no longer supported. The recommended path is joining the Graph usage reporting APIs (including getTeamsUserActivityUserDetail) with your own data and building the dashboard yourself.
For a broader view of where the platform’s ceilings sit, see our write-up of Microsoft Teams limitations.
Third-party Teams reporting tools
Third-party tools earn their place when you need one of four things: retention beyond 180 days, cross-workload governance reporting, synthetic monitoring that catches problems before users call, or contact-centre-grade call queue analytics.
| Tool | Best for | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| AdminDroid | Breadth of prebuilt reports across Microsoft 365 | 1,500+ prebuilt reports platform-wide; Teams coverage includes memberships, private channels, permissions, inactive users, device usage; has a free tier |
| Clobba Flex (Code Software) | Call queues, auto attendants and licence adoption | Modular: call queue analytics, licence adoption, UC analytics, voice recording; 30-day free trial |
| Martello Vantage DX | Proactive monitoring before users complain | Synthetic testing including Teams Phone calls to PSTN numbers; correlates network path tracing with Microsoft performance data |
| Syskit Point | Governance and permissions reporting | Workspace inventory, permission matrices, inactive workspace detection, external user access, Copilot readiness |
| eG Innovations | Deep call quality analytics alongside infrastructure | Call quality analytics layer with stream ratings and failure reasons; useful where Teams sits next to VDI |
A note on the vendors that used to top these lists: Voleer (BitTitan) has been retired and replaced by a narrower migration assessment tool, and Beesy is a task-management app with a Teams dashboard rather than a Teams reporting platform. If you inherited a tooling shortlist written before 2024, it is worth re-checking every name on it.
Whichever you pick, one piece of advice is worth repeating: choose one method and stay with it. Consistency matters more than feature count. Two half-populated dashboards are worse than one that everybody trusts.
Reporting on the work, not just the traffic
Here is the gap native Teams reporting will never close. Teams reports tell you that a channel produced 412 messages last month. They do not tell you whether the project discussed in that channel is behind.
Fig. 3. Which console answers which question
Most teams already keep the answer in SharePoint — tasks, requests, approvals, bookings, whatever the team runs on. What is missing is a way to see it without leaving Teams and without exporting to Excel every Friday.
That is what Virto Charts & Data Visualization App for Microsoft Teams does. It connects to SharePoint lists and turns them into dashboards inside a Teams tab — status charts, workload by team member, completion metrics, lead time, burndown. The data never leaves your Microsoft 365 tenant, and permissions follow the underlying list, so people see exactly what they are already allowed to see.
It pairs naturally with the admin-side reports: Microsoft tells you how people are collaborating, the charts tell you what that collaboration is producing.
The wider Virto apps for Microsoft 365 range covers the adjacent pieces — calendars, Kanban boards, notifications — and every Virto product comes with a 30-day free trial, no credit card required. If you are assembling a Teams stack rather than a single app, our guides to Microsoft Teams integrations and the best apps for Microsoft Teams are a good starting point, and SharePoint list reporting covers the data layer underneath.
Building a Teams reporting routine that survives contact with reality
A workable rhythm, in four steps.
- Decide what the report is for. Licence reclamation, adoption tracking, quality troubleshooting and governance audits need different reports at different cadences. A single “Teams dashboard” that tries to serve all four serves none.
- Fix the identity setting first. If you need per-user detail, get the concealment setting turned off before you build anything. Discovering hashed user IDs halfway through a licence-reclamation project is a painful way to lose a week.
- Export on a schedule. Because the built-in window tops out at 180 days, monthly CSV exports into a folder are the cheapest long-term archive there is. Do it before you need it.
- Split quality from usage. Never build one dashboard that mixes them. Usage is batch, 24–72 hours old, and reliable. Quality is near real time, telemetry-based, and explicitly not a source of truth for counting. They answer different questions on different clocks and they belong on different pages.
Frequently asked questions
How do I get Microsoft Teams reports?
From the Teams admin center (Analytics & reports > Usage reports) and Microsoft 365 usage reports (Reports > Usage > Microsoft Teams). Third-party tools add deeper or real-time analytics. You need an admin role — Teams Administrator, Global Reader, Reports Reader or similar; team owners cannot pull organisational reports.
Is there real-time Teams reporting?
Partly. Real-Time Analytics shows live meeting telemetry for meetings in progress, and the Call Quality Dashboard runs on a near-real-time feed with records typically available within 30 minutes. Usage and activity reports are batch and lag 24–72 hours.
How far back does Teams reporting go?
Built-in usage reports cover 7, 30, 90 or 180 days. Call Quality Dashboard keeps 12 months, but strips end-user identifiable information after 28 days. Microsoft 365 usage analytics in Power BI presents up to 12 months of monthly data. Anything longer requires exporting.
Why do Teams reports show random letters instead of user names?
Because concealment is on by default (since 1 September 2021). A Global Administrator can clear Conceal user, group, and site names in all reports under Settings > Org settings > Services > Reports in the Microsoft 365 admin center.
What is the difference between Call analytics and the Call Quality Dashboard?
Call analytics is per-user and per-meeting, for diagnosing one person’s problem. CQD is org-wide and aggregate, for spotting patterns across subnets, buildings and client versions.
Can I find inactive teams?
Not directly. Usage reports show activity, so a team with no recent activity simply does not appear — which is different from a report listing dormant teams with owners and creation dates. For that, use Microsoft Graph, PowerShell, or a governance tool such as Syskit Point or AdminDroid.
Can I export Teams reports to Excel?
Yes. Most reports have Export to Excel, producing a CSV of the underlying rows. Note that audio, video and screen-share times export in ISO 8601 duration format, so they need converting before you can chart them.
Does the Teams live event usage report still work?
Teams live events retired on 30 June 2026, with already-scheduled events honoured through 28 February 2027. New broadcast-style events are town halls, and they report through the Teams events usage report.
Can I report on project progress from inside Teams?
Not with native Teams reports — they measure collaboration activity, not work status. For that you need a tab that visualises your task or project data, such as Virto Charts running against a SharePoint list.