📁 Recipe · SharePoint & OneDrive

Review SharePoint and OneDrive Storage Quotas to Identify Sites Nearing Limits

Identify SharePoint sites and OneDrive accounts approaching storage quotas using Microsoft Graph usage reports, and plan cleanup or quota expansion.

Complexity

Intermediate

Impact

governance + cost-optimization + capacity-planning + sharepoint + onedrive

Context

Why This Matters

SharePoint sites and OneDrive accounts in Microsoft 365 have per-site and per-user storage quotas. When a site hits its quota, uploads fail, sync breaks, and workflows stall — often with no warning until users complain. Proactive quota review lets administrators spot hot spots early, plan cleanup of stale content or version history, and expand quotas before they bite.

Run this recipe on a regular cadence (monthly or quarterly) as part of tenant governance hygiene, or on demand when storage-related tickets spike, before a large migration, or when the tenant's pooled SharePoint storage is nearing its overall limit.

When to run it

Monthly or quarterly governance review
Users report failed uploads or sync errors
Before onboarding a large team, project, or migration
When tenant-level SharePoint storage utilization crosses 75%

Expected Outcomes

After completing this recipe you will have:

A full inventory of SharePoint sites and OneDrive accounts with current Storage Used and Storage Allocated values
A filtered list of resources exceeding the alert threshold (default 80% of quota)
A ranked list of top storage consumers for cleanup or quota-increase decisions
An audit-ready CSV/report suitable for sharing with data owners or compliance
A defensible recommendation for each at-risk site: cleanup, archive, or expand quota

Risks & Considerations

Warnings & gotchas

Report latency: Graph usage reports lag real-time activity by 24–48 hours. A site that just filled up may not appear in the report yet.
Anonymized names: If displayConcealedNames is enabled in the tenant's report settings, owner display names and UPNs will be masked. Toggle ReportSettings.ReadWrite.All temporarily or correlate by Site ID.
Do not auto-delete: Never script automatic file deletion based on storage reports. Always involve the site owner and follow retention/legal-hold policies before removing content.
Quota vs. tenant pool: Increasing a single site's quota does not create new storage — it draws from the tenant's pooled allotment. Confirm tenant-level headroom in the SharePoint admin center first.
Version history sprawl: Most "full" sites are bloated by major version history, not active content. Check version settings before provisioning more storage.
Archived / deleted sites: Sites flagged Is Deleted = True still appear in the report for 93 days. Exclude them from alerting.

Required Permissions

Permission	Why It's Needed
Reports.Read.All	Read SharePoint and OneDrive usage detail reports via Microsoft Graph.
Sites.Read.All	Resolve site URLs and metadata when reports do not include them.
ReportSettings.ReadWrite.All	Optional — toggle tenant report anonymization so owner names/UPNs are visible.
SharePoint Administrator	Required in the SharePoint admin center to view quotas in the GUI and to adjust site-level quotas if expansion is chosen.

The fastest way to get this done — just ask Dex. Copy the prompt below and paste it into your Dex conversation.

For IT Admins

Paste into Dex CoAdmin

Review SharePoint sites and OneDrive accounts nearing their storage quotas. Pull the getSharePointSiteUsageDetail and getOneDriveUsageAccountDetail reports (period D90), flag any resource at or above {threshold_percent}% of its allocated quota, rank the top consumers, and produce a CSV of at-risk sites with owner and recommended action (cleanup vs. expand).

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