š”ļøThe Escalation Protocol
For those who fix first, document second, and answer to no one but uptime.
Welcome to the chaos.
This is my vault of raw, battle-worn knowledge from the trenches of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE) support.
Born from busted endpoints, cursed telemetry, and support cases that broke both logic and spirit, this repo is my personal rebellion against:
- Internal wikis no one reads
- Documentation review queues that move slower than a OneDrive sync on hotel Wi-Fi
- Governance models cooked up by developer teams where 80% have never spoken to a customer in their lives, and the other 20% havenāt done so since Internet Explorer had a fan base.
- Models summoned by sacrificing the blood and broken dreams of the guy who said āCustomer Obsession is at the core of our cultureā ā crafted in echo chambers, tested in sterile lab conditions, then dumped on frontline engineers like flaming garbage bagsāwith a smile.
- Formatting rules written for Copilotās cravings, not the human bleeding at 2AM to help the customer paying for Copilotās existence. Because it's not about clarity, or sanityāitās about compliance with the machine.
- And the soul-crushing experience of watching great knowledge die in private chats
If youāve ever spent hours solving a problem only to realize that no one else will ever see that fixāI built this for you.
š„ Why This Exists
Because knowledge should be sacred.
In support, it should be the currency, right after customer obsession.
Every interaction, every ticket, every hair-pulling investigationāshould be treated as an oportunity to generate new knowledged, improve the exisitng and share it.
Nowadays it seems to be all about formatting for ingestion, not usefulness.
Shareability, clarity, and actual actionability were never the framework.
They were the exceptionāfor people like me, who put in the elbow grease.
And now even that option is gone, buried under the botās hunger for perfectly structured metadata.
So I said screw it.
If the system won't let me share knowledge the right way, Iāll do it my way.
Messy. Honest. Fast. Human.
This is my initiative. My protest. My contribution.
Long story short I built this place.
To fight that decay.
To make knowledge accessible, findable, actionable, and human again.
Hereās hoping that when a manager inevitably stumbles across this, they get the pointā
and donāt immediately ask for my head.
This is documentation with teeth.
āļø What You'll Find Here
- Real-world MDE support workflows that actually solve things
- Diagnostic methods forged in the fires of "we have no telemetry"
- Detection logic and scripts written at 2am out of spite
- Commentary, rants, and occasional jokes at the expense of broken policy engines
š§ Who This Is For
- Support engineers who are tired of treating Teams chats as source control
- Security pros who want answers, not architecture diagrams
- Curious nerds who want to see how the sausage is madeāand maybe cook their own
š§ How to Use This Repo
- Start in the Wiki and then use the resources provided in the folders:
troubleshooting/,scripts/, ... - Read the comments. The gold is in the context.
- Never deploy blindly. This is a map, not GPS.
- Contribute if youāve got something to share. This isnāt just a rantāitās a revolution.
ā ļø LEGENDARY DISCLAIMER (READ THIS OR REGRET IT)
This content is shared in good faith, powered by pain, coffee, and pure technical spite.
That does not mean itās safe to use without a brain.
š§Æ Donāt be a dumbass.
If you take anything from this repo and run it in production without testingā
you are lighting the fuse on your own dumpster fire. Iām not responsible, and Iām not bringing marshmallows.
I do not take responsibility for (but not limited to):
- Broken tenants
- Deleted data
- Detection logic that gains sentience
- Alert floods that wake up the entire SOC
- Bricked endpoints that refuse to boot out of spite
- CISO expontaneuos combustion
- SIEMs that scream like banshees before falling over
- Intune policies looping into the ninth circle of hell
- Scripts that nuke your GPOs because you typoād a path
- Licensing behavior that makes no sense to anyone on Earth
- Support tickets I end up owning because you didnāt read this
- āQuick testsā in production that spawn incident bridges
- Clippy whispering āI warned youā from your logs
- An AI-powered internal review bot flagging your work as noncompliant while your customer bleeds
Let me be crystal clear:
Youāre not paying me. Thereās no SLA. Thereās no safety net. And I am absolutely not your scapegoat.
This is not official.
This is not sanitized.
This is not bulletproof.
Itās a toolkit.
Itās a war journal.
Itās OURS. - (but mostly mine)
𤬠Before You Go Full Karen
Feel like complaining? Hereās your three-step protocol:
Step 1: Call AT&T.
Step 2: Scream at the poor bastard on the other end of the lineāthe overworked, underpaid, outsourced soul clawing through a 12-hour shift in a flickering fluorescent-lit hellscape. The guy who has to smile while getting chewed out for problems way above his pay grade by people like you, who think they have it rough just because they never bothered to learn what prorating means. Heās armed with nothing but a half-broken headset, a system that crashes twice an hour, and a script written by someone whoās never taken a callāor a punch to the gutāfrom a customer in their life. The guy who hasnāt seen sunlight in weeks, whose metrics punish him for empathy, and whose only crime was being born into needing a job to eat. He canāt quit. Canāt complain. Canāt even hope. Because the politicians back home didnāt just rob the coffersāthey looted the screws holding the office chairs together. (Yeah. Iāve been that guy too).
Step 3: When you feel like being human again come back and let“s make shit happen.
š¬ Contributions & Feedback
Pull requests are welcome. But bring real stuffāno fluff, no ego, no ālet me just fix this commaā energy.
Weāre building something better than the system here. Keep it sharp. Keep it human.
š„ Final Words
This repo exists Because customers deserve better.
Because we canāt keep losing valuable insights to red tape and review queues.
Because I got tired of being told no.
No, thatās not formatted right.
No, that canāt go in the wiki.
No, thatās not aligned with our ingestion goals.
So hereās my yes:
Yes to clarity.
Yes to usefulness.
Yes to doing the right thing, even if itās unofficial.
Test responsibly.
Document fiercely.
Fight the entropy.
Welcome to the somewhat controlled chaos.
Your friendly, burnt-the-f-out MDE Support Engineer,
*ā Arkthos