SC-401: Track Sensitive Data in Action

Key insights

• Microsoft Purview: The video shows how Purview’s Content and Activity tools let teams find, monitor, and investigate sensitive data across Microsoft 365 and endpoints.
  
• Activity Explorer: This tool reveals actions on labeled content—when labels change, DLP events occur, or files are accessed—using up to 30 days of unified audit log data for investigations.
  
• Filter sets: The interface offers about 50 filters and lets admins save custom or predefined filter sets to quickly focus on specific activity types like Endpoint DLP or label changes.
  
• Full file evidence: Recent updates provide direct links to source files tied to flagged events, improving traceability and speeding up root-cause analysis.
  
• Sensitivity labels: The training emphasizes tracking label application and removal alongside DLP signals to spot misuse, insider risk, or policy gaps within a Zero Trust approach.
  
• Compliance monitoring: The demo ties the tools to SC-401 exam topics and real-world tasks—use filter sets, review file evidence, and act on alerts to maintain compliance and reduce data risk.
  

Overview: A concise look at the video

The YouTube video by Peter Rising [MVP], titled "SC-401 Part 6: Content & Activity Explorer Uncovered – Track Sensitive Data in Action!", walks viewers through how to use Microsoft Purview's Content Explorer and Activity Explorer to monitor labeled sensitive data across an organization. Peter frames the demo as both a practical walkthrough and a resource for SC-401 exam preparation, so the content balances technical detail with exam-focused guidance. As a result, the presentation appeals to compliance practitioners and learners who need hands-on examples. Consequently, the video makes it easier to see how the tools behave in real scenarios.

What Activity Explorer does

First, the video explains that Activity Explorer collects and shows events about actions taken on sensitivity-labelled content, drawing from the unified audit logs in Microsoft 365. Furthermore, it provides a historical view of when labels are applied, changed, or removed and records DLP events and information protection activity. This historical perspective helps investigators reconstruct sequences of events and spot trends over time. Therefore, administrators can use the tool for both reactive investigations and proactive monitoring.

In addition, Peter demonstrates how the interface surfaces key context such as the user, device, activity type, and the sensitivity label that was involved. He notes that the tool retains up to 30 days of activity data in this view, which suits many short-term investigations but also introduces retention tradeoffs for longer audits. Moreover, the video emphasizes that full file evidence links were added recently, improving traceability to the original item. As a result, incident response becomes more efficient when analysts can jump directly to source files during triage.

Key features and recent updates

Next, the video highlights that Activity Explorer offers roughly 50 filters including date, activity type, location, sensitivity label, user, and device, which together enable very specific queries. Peter shows how admins can save predefined and custom filter sets to speed up recurring investigations, and he demonstrates filter examples for Endpoint DLP and label changes. Consequently, teams can reduce noise and focus on the most relevant events without rebuilding queries each time. In short, the filtering capabilities make the tool more practical for complex environments.

Additionally, recent improvements such as the ability to view full file evidence enhance forensic value, while richer filter sets streamline common workflows. However, Peter also points out that expanding features increase interface complexity, so teams must invest time to learn and refine saved filters. Therefore, organizations should balance the benefit of finer-grained views against the operational cost of maintaining effective filter libraries. Over time, good governance and documentation reduce that cost and improve response speed.

Tradeoffs and operational challenges

While the tool adds important visibility, Peter discusses tradeoffs that teams should consider when adopting it. For example, the 30-day activity window for the unified view may not meet regulatory or internal audit requirements that demand longer retention, and relying on audit logs means organizations must ensure logging is enabled and complete. Moreover, using many filters can uncover false positives, so investigators need to tune detection thresholds and validate findings before taking action. Thus, balancing sensitivity with signal quality becomes a key operational task.

Privacy and access control also present challenges, since Activity Explorer surfaces user-level and file-level details that require careful handling. Consequently, organizations must define who can query sensitive activity and how results are stored or shared to avoid exposing confidential investigation details. In addition, cross-team coordination between security, compliance, and IT is critical because investigations often span multiple tools and systems. Therefore, process design and role-based access help mitigate these operational risks.

Practical guidance and exam relevance

Finally, Peter frames many demonstrations as useful both for real-world deployments and for SC-401 exam study, noting that practical familiarity with the UI and filter logic helps candidates and practitioners alike. He recommends creating sample filter sets for typical scenarios such as endpoint exfiltration, label rollback, and high-risk file access, so teams can respond quickly when alerts appear. Moreover, he advises validating the data pipeline—ensuring that unified audit logs are capturing events correctly—before relying on Explorer output for decisions. Consequently, the video serves as a step-by-step complement to documentation and hands-on labs.

In summary, the video presents Content Explorer and Activity Explorer as powerful tools for tracking labeled sensitive data, while also calling out practical limits around retention, complexity, and privacy controls. Overall, Peter Rising’s clear demos and balanced discussion help viewers understand both the capabilities and the tradeoffs they will face when deploying these Microsoft Purview features. Therefore, compliance teams and exam candidates can use this material to plan pilots, refine workflows, and prepare for scenarios they may encounter in operations or on the SC-401 exam.

Keywords

Content and Activity Explorer, Track Sensitive Data, Microsoft Purview DLP tutorial, Content Explorer walkthrough, Activity Explorer demo, SC-401 exam prep lab, Sensitive data discovery tools, Real-time data tracking