Today Microsoft announced the new Office 365 Management Activity API. The API will be released in a private preview this summer (sign up here), with some partners already developing security and compliance solutions.

As the Office blog post points out, it’s crucial in an organization to know who is accessing your information or using your services and if your security and compliance checks are working. The Management Activity API provides the visibility needed to track that information. They write:

In our continuing effort to provide greater transparency into Office 365 service operations, we are working to deliver more event types, greater detail in event records, and consistent schemas for per-person, per-transaction logs for all user, admin and operational events. In addition, we are enabling instrumentation across the entire Office 365 service suite and providing standard RESTful APIs with OAuth v2 for easy consumption of these logs, to power your security, compliance and operational applications that serve your business needs.

Later this week we will feature posts related to this information: an overview of one of the third-party tools listed in the Office blogs post, and a how-to video on accessing tenant health reports from the Office 365 admin center. Stay tuned!