SharePoint Manager Plus provides a wide range of reports as part of its SharePoint reporting capabilities. These reports help administrators monitor and manage SharePoint without the operational limitations posed by native tools like the SharePoint admin center. A key report in SharePoint Manager Plus is the Site Storage Growth Trends report.
Why you need a report to monitor site storage growth
SharePoint's storage model is designed around quotas. Each site collection operates within a Site Storage Limit drawn from the organization's SharePoint Storage Quota, and when that limit is hit, uploads stop. The SharePoint admin center's Storage Metrics Page and SharePoint Storage Report show how much of each quota is currently consumed, but they do not display how fast that consumption is changing. A site collection at 60% of its quota could be stable for the next two years or exhausted in three months, and native tools provide no way to tell the difference without taking manual snapshots, exporting the data, and doing the comparison in a spreadsheet. This is often a time-consuming and intricate process.
A dedicated storage growth report gives administrators the forward-looking storage view that makes this protracted process unnecessary:
- Forecast quota depletion: See which site collections are growing fast enough to hit their storage limit soon, and act before uploads start failing.
- Catch version history bloat: High growth with low user activity usually points to unchecked version history, not new content. Flag these sites for version limit enforcement rather than a blanket quota increase.
- Support life cycle planning: Fast-growing sites with low engagement need a review. Sites that have stopped growing entirely may be ready for archival or decommissioning.
- Back storage budget requests with real data: A single sitewide current-consumption figure supports a weak case for increasing the budget. In contrast, per-site growth rates give the finance and infrastructure teams the trend evidence needed to budget 12 to 24 months out.
- Catch unexpected growth spikes: A sudden jump in a site's growth rate, from a bulk migration, automated workflow, or large file share, shows up in the report without manual site-by-site checks.
What is the Site Storage Growth Trends report in SharePoint Manager Plus?
The Site Storage Growth Trends report tracks how storage consumption is changing across every SharePoint site collection over a selected time period. For each site collection, it shows the starting storage figure at the beginning of the period, the ending figure at its close, the absolute amount of storage added, and the percentage growth rate that represents. This gives administrators the trend data that the SharePoint Storage Report's point-in-time view cannot provide. This trend data displays the difference between how full a site collection is today and how fast it will be full next month.
What does the Site Storage Growth Trends report show?
Using SharePoint Manager Plus, you can filter the Site Storage Growth Trends report with the following fields.
- Farm: Select the SharePoint farm or Microsoft 365 tenant from which you want to pull storage growth data.
- Period: Set a custom date range to define the window over which Initial Storage and Final Storage are measured.
- Site Collection: Narrow the report to specific sites to focus growth analysis on particular teams, departments, or project environments.
The Site Storage Growth Trends report displays the following details for every site collection in the selected scope.
| Attribute | Description |
|---|---|
| URL | The web address of the site collection being measured. |
| Site Collection Name | The display name of the site collection. |
| Storage at Start Date | The amount of storage used by the site collection at the beginning of the selected reporting period. |
| Storage at End Date | The amount of storage used by the site collection at the end of the selected reporting period. |
| Storage Growth | The net change in storage consumption between the start and end dates of the reporting period. |
| Storage Growth Rate | The percentage change in storage consumption from the start date to the end date, providing a normalized view of growth over the reporting period. |
Native SharePoint admin portals and PowerShell vs. SharePoint Manager Plus
The SharePoint admin center shows current storage usage at the tenant and site levels. Active Sites displays storage consumption for each site collection, while Storage Metrics breaks usage down by document libraries, version history, and the recycle bin. However, these native tools do not compare storage across two dates or calculate how quickly storage is growing.
PowerShell can retrieve current storage data through Get-SPOSite or Microsoft Graph, but calculating growth requires running queries at different times, storing the results, and building and maintaining custom comparison scripts. This becomes difficult to manage across hundreds of sites.
SharePoint Manager Plus provides initial storage, final storage, storage growth, and growth rate directly within the report. Admins can choose any reporting period, apply filters, schedule recurring reports, and export the results without scripting.
Benefits of SharePoint Manager Plus' Site Storage Growth Trends report over other SharePoint reports
With SharePoint Manager Plus, your report combines the depth of PowerShell with the convenience of a centralized admin center.
| Capability | SharePoint admin center | PowerShell | The SharePoint Manager Plus advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Report accessibility | ❌ Manual filtering is required every time | ❌ Script execution is required for every run | ✅ Get one-click access to categorized reports |
| Custom reports | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ Create custom reports by saving granular, attribute-based conditional filters |
| Report exports | ✅ Reports can be exported only in CSV or JSON formats | ✅ Requires additional scripting to format and export data | ✅ Reports can be exported in CSV, HTML, PDF, and XLSX formats |
| Emailing reports to admins | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ Send report emails to stakeholders and admins in preferred formats |
| Automated report generation | ❌ This requires technical scripting or separate complex add-ons | ❌ This requires Task Scheduler or Azure Automation | ✅ Schedule multiple reports that can be generated, filtered, emailed, and exported between defined periods automatically |
Features that enhance the Site Storage Growth Trends report
SharePoint Manager Plus provides several built-in tools to help you act on, schedule, and distribute the storage growth insights surfaced by the Site Storage Growth Trends report.
- Automated report generation: Schedule the report to run at defined intervals, such as daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly, so storage growth trends are continuously tracked.
- Export reports: Download the Site Storage Growth Trends report in CSV, PDF, HTML, or XLSX formats for distribution to infrastructure leads, finance teams, and compliance stakeholders.
- Email alerts for accelerating growth: Configure threshold-based alerts to notify administrators when a site collection's storage consumption exceeds a defined threshold.
- Clear version storage at the source: Cross-reference growth trends with version reports to spot bloated sites, then trim version history directly from the SharePoint Manager Plus interface.
- Custom reports: Customize the fields and filters in the Site Storage Growth Trends report, then save your preferred settings as a custom report for easy access whenever needed.
Reports that complement the Site Storage Growth Trends report
If you are managing storage capacity or planning infrastructure decisions in SharePoint, these reports work alongside the Site Storage Growth Trends report to give you a fuller picture.
Storage Trends Overview report: Pairs each site collection's growth trajectory with its current utilization, including how much of the allocated storage is already consumed.
Storage Trends History report: Covers the same metrics as the Overview but across an adjustable historical window, making it the right tool for tracing when a growth spike began or how consumption changed after a cleanup.
Monthly Storage Trends report: Isolates storage and file count changes month by month, surfacing the seasonal patterns and acceleration that a single growth rate figure cannot.
Storage by Version reports: Shows how much of each site collection's storage is consumed by version history specifically. This is useful for confirming whether version accumulation is the primary driver behind a high growth rate.
SharePoint site activity reports: Cross-references growth rate data with page views and active file counts to separate legitimate collaboration growth from content sprawl.
Other features of SharePoint Manager Plus
- SharePoint management: Grant, remove, or copy SharePoint permissions, and manage group members in bulk without relying on complex scripts, simplifying your SharePoint administration.
- SharePoint reporting: Access over 140 prebuilt and custom reports for SharePoint—including permissions, site usage, content inventory, and security insights—all from a centralized dashboard.
- SharePoint auditing: Maintain a comprehensive, searchable audit trail of all activities across your SharePoint environment, including user actions, permission changes, and content modifications.
- SharePoint alerting: Receive real-time alerts on critical events such as permission changes, suspicious user activities, site access anomalies, and policy violations.
- Delegated administration: Empower help desk technicians with granular, role-based access to perform specific SharePoint administrative tasks, without elevating native privileges.
- SharePoint migration: Simplify SharePoint migration by enabling seamless content and permission migration across sites and tenants, with minimal downtime and full visibility into migration progress.
