Squirrel Analytics - Storage, Activity and Cost Trends
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Alongside the downloadable reports, the Squirrel dashboard carries five read-only analytics pages. Where reports answer "give me the numbers as a file", these answer "show me the trend" - which sites are growing, which have gone quiet, and whether archiving has paid for itself yet.
Storage Comparison
Two tabs, both about storage over time.
Storage Comparison plots cumulative archived blob storage against SharePoint storage across the billing timeline, with a dashed crossover point reference line. Stat panels show initial storage, the crossover point, and archived blob storage. The crossover marks where the cost of what you have archived is outweighed by the SharePoint capacity you are no longer paying for - so this is the chart to take to a budget conversation. Until it happens, the crossover panel reads "Not reached" rather than estimating a date.
SharePoint Timeline is a dual-axis chart of total SharePoint used (TB) against site count, over a selectable range from 6 hours to all data, defaulting to 7 days. Stat panels cover current size, total sites, and size change across the period. This is where unexpected tenant growth shows up first.
Transaction Analysis
A monthly chart of archive transactions against restore transactions, with stat panels for average monthly archives, average monthly restores, and the archive-to-restore ratio - which carries a plain-English descriptor rather than leaving you to interpret a number, ranging from "Much more archiving than restoring" through to "More restoring than archiving".
That ratio is worth watching. Archiving far more than you restore is the expected healthy pattern. A drift toward restoring suggests your policies are archiving content that is still in use, which is a signal to revisit site policies rather than to stop archiving.
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SharePoint Site Analysis
Top 10 Sites by Total Size as a horizontal bar chart, with a site search in the header. Click a site bar - or search for a site - to load Size History for it: a month-by-month area chart with initial size, current size, and growth. Sites that started from near zero show growth as "New" rather than an unhelpful percentage.
Two common uses: finding the biggest sites to onboard into archiving, and showing a site owner their own growth curve when you need them to agree to a policy.
SharePoint Site Activity
The dormant-site finder, ranked by days since last activity. This is how you build a "candidates for aggressive archiving" list with evidence behind it.
- Data-maturity banner - shows the platform install date and how many days have been monitored, and states plainly that reliable dormant-site identification needs 180+ days of collection. Read this first. A site that looks dormant after three weeks of monitoring may simply not have been observed long enough.
- Stat cards - total sites (counting only sites that have files), dormant sites at 180+ days, active sites under 90 days, and inactive storage at 365+ days in GB.
- Charts - Top 20 Sites by Inactivity as a colour-banded bar chart, plus a dormant / moderate / active pie.
- Table - per site: days inactive, total files, active files with an inline window selector from 7 to 730 days (default 30), an activity score giving the percentage of files touched in that window, total size, last activity ("Never" where there is none), and a link to the site. Filter chips for All / Dormant / Moderate / Active, plus search.
The activity score is the column that settles arguments. "This site has had 2% of its files touched in the last 30 days" is a more durable justification for a policy threshold than "it feels quiet".
File Type Analytics
The top 20 archived file extensions as a bar chart, toggleable between By Size and By Count - which are often different stories, since a handful of large media files can outweigh thousands of documents. Stat cards show the largest file type, the most common file type with its percentage share, and total storage consumed.
When these numbers refresh
The analytics pages are not live. Knowing the cadence explains most "why doesn't this match?" questions:
| Numbers | Refresh |
|---|---|
| Archive and restore counts and volumes, total SharePoint size, percentage archived, total archived files | Nightly, around 3am |
| Site list, per-site sizes, label catalogue | Nightly, around 2am |
| Site size history | One point per calendar month - the current month's point keeps moving until month end |
| File Type Analytics and Site Activity | Weekly, on Sunday |
Two things worth knowing beyond the table. If the audit-log job overruns into the refresh window, that night's refresh is skipped and the numbers are a day stale rather than wrong - they will catch up on the next successful run. And archived storage figures are measured at original, uncompressed source size, which is the honest "space freed from SharePoint" number rather than the smaller figure Squirrel actually stores after compression.
Sites with no files at all do not appear in Site Activity.
See also
- Reports - the 23 downloadable reports, including per-site CSV for chargeback.
- Site settings - per-site size and status, and where policies are set.
- Site custom policies - acting on what these pages tell you.
- Recycle Bin capture - capture activity is reported separately.
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