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underQualifried's avatar
underQualifried
Iron Contributor
Jul 16, 2025

Searching for Activities in Audit Log returns repeated results - appears broken

I'm in Defender, using the Audit Log tool, trying to find out who changed the Anti-Phishing policy on the 23rd of January. Selecting the 'Activities - friendly names' drop-down, and inputting 'policy' returns 

  1. A number of different categories + activities for stuff unrelated to Defender (ie, Purview, CoPilot in Outlook,, SharePoint AI use, the 365 AC, 'Places Directory' - whatever that is) but nothing related to Defender (the tool I'm opening it within)...
  2. The same category - M365 Apps Admin Services cloud policy activities - about 30 times, with every activity it includes. Probably 70% of the results, are just this same thing over and over. I looked into it - because I've never heard of this, yet it SOUNDS like something related to what I do.

First off, on the [audit log activities](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purview/audit-log-activities#microsoft-365-apps-admin-services-cloud-policy-activities) KB, this category is listed once, with 4 activities. there's about 13 that show up in each duplicated category in the search, so that's unhelpful. It links to another kb which seems to imply that 'Cloud Policy service' is not an actual thing - it's just a marketing/conceptual term for a functionality of InTune. Why it's not in the InTune KB - I do not know - I've made some suggestions to the KB's 

 

The first KB I mentioned does not list any activities for Defender's policies - there's stuff for Endpoint (multiple categories), XDR (multiple categories)... So I have 2 questions. 

1) Is anyone able to advise how to get the data I want? At this point, I'm not even sure this audit log would PULL any relevant data, based on the lack of activities - so I don't really want to just blanket search for that date, and sift through stuff. 

2) Does anyone know how to use this tool effectively? Know of a KB that is good and reliable and helpful? 

Thanks

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