How to monitor storage usage in SharePoint Online

Office 365 users get quite a bit of storage on SharePoint Online for content, be it files, metadata, databases, etc. Customers on the Small Business and Professionals plan receive up to 35GB in total however those on Enterprise plans can store up to 5TB.

The question then becomes – how do you monitor how much space your SharePoint Online site collection is used? This opens up the further question of understanding what sub-sites and libraries in SharePoint Online are consuming.

There are three different ways to monitor the space used in SharePoint Online.

The first is at the site collection level (accessible by going to https://portal.microsoftonline.com) where customers can manage the total amount of space allocated to each site collection, as well as seeing the total amount of space utilised. Note that this can only be accessed for customers on Enterprise plans.

The first method doesn’t provide you with any understanding of where the storage space within SharePoint Online is being consumed. The second method utilises the Storage Metrics functionality which can be accessed by clicking on Site Settings and then Storage Metrics underneath Site Collection Administration.

The first time you click on Storage Metrics it will most likely show no data, however if you check back within a few hours the breakdown of content usage will then be shown. What is great about Storage Metrics is that it allows you to drill down to each site, library and even folder to show a very granular report on your storage consumption.

The third and far more granular method is to use third-party utilities which connect to your SharePoint Online site collections and interrogate them to determine usage patterns and trends as well as licence consumption. Most of these tools cost money, however Quest Software recently released its Site Administrator Reports for SharePoint Online as an on-demand solution for free. This tool can be accessed by browsing to http://sar.ondemand.quest.com.

All of the above provide administrators of Office 365 environments with a variety of information to allow them to monitor and manage the storage usage of their SharePoint Online site collections.

Loryan Strant is a Microsoft Office 365 MVP (Most Valuable Professional). Follow him on Twitter @TheCloudMouth.