Hangout Chats Monitoring

Question

Can we have API's for monitoring the chats between different users and group in Hangout within our organisation . This will help Admin to have better control over the content which is being communicated within organisation and to control outside of organisation. Also if any of these type of API is present where I can get detail chats of all user, please let me know.

Answer 1

Google chat's messages can be fetch through Gmail API, you can make a Messages.List request to get all the messages from Chat and Gmail. To filter only by the ones in chat, you can use the following query q parameter:

label:CHAT

With a Messages.Get request you can get the data for each message.

Finally, that would only give you the data of the user you're using the credentials from, to get the data for all the organization you need to use a service account with domain wide delegation in order to impersonate each user in the domain and be able to do the mentioned process with each user's credentials.

EDIT

As you also need chat group's information as name and members, you need to use Hangouts Chat API and set-up an application/bot using a service account credentials as explained in this example with Python:

from httplib2 import Http
from oauth2client.service_account import ServiceAccountCredentials
from apiclient.discovery import build
scopes = 'https://www.googleapis.com/auth/chat.bot'
credentials = ServiceAccountCredentials.from_json_keyfile_name(
    'service-account.json', scopes)
chat = build('chat', 'v1', http=credentials.authorize(Http()))
resp = chat.spaces().messages().create(
    parent='spaces/AAAA2CiqVDM', # use your space here
    body={'text': 'Test message'}).execute()
print(resp)

The above code makes a message create request, but similarly you can use it to make any of the other available requests. You can use a different language library as well.