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🗡️The 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% haven’t done so since Internet Explorer had a fan base.
  • Models summoned by sacrificing the blood and broken dreams of the guy who said “Customer Obsession is at the core of our culture” — crafted in echo chambers, tested in sterile lab conditions, then dumped on frontline engineers like flaming garbage bags—with a smile.
  • Formatting rules written for Copilot’s cravings, not the human bleeding at 2AM to help the customer paying for Copilot’s existence. Because it's not about clarity, or sanity—it’s about compliance with the machine.
  • And the soul-crushing experience of watching great knowledge die in private chats

If you’ve ever spent hours solving a problem only to realize that no one else will ever see that fix—I built this for you.

💥 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 investigation—should 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 exception—for people like me, who put in the elbow grease.
And now even that option is gone, buried under the bot’s hunger for perfectly structured metadata.

So I said screw it.
If the system won't let me share knowledge the right way, I’ll 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.

Here’s hoping that when a manager inevitably stumbles across this, they get the point—
and don’t immediately ask for my head.

This is documentation with teeth.

⚙️ 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

🧠 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 made—and maybe cook their own

🧭 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 you’ve got something to share. This isn’t just a rant—it’s a revolution.

⚠️ 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 it’s safe to use without a brain.

🧯 Don’t be a dumbass.
If you take anything from this repo and run it in production without testing—
you are lighting the fuse on your own dumpster fire. I’m not responsible, and I’m 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 typo’d a path
  • Licensing behavior that makes no sense to anyone on Earth
  • Support tickets I end up owning because you didn’t read this
  • “Quick tests” in production that spawn incident bridges
  • Clippy whispering “I warned you” from your logs
  • An AI-powered internal review bot flagging your work as noncompliant while your customer bleeds

Let me be crystal clear:
You’re not paying me. There’s no SLA. There’s no safety net. And I am absolutely not your scapegoat.

This is not official.
This is not sanitized.
This is not bulletproof.

It’s a toolkit.
It’s a war journal.
It’s OURS. - (but mostly mine)

🤬 Before You Go Full Karen

Feel like complaining? Here’s your three-step protocol:

Step 1: Call AT&T.
Step 2: Scream at the poor bastard on the other end of the line—the 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. He’s armed with nothing but a half-broken headset, a system that crashes twice an hour, and a script written by someone who’s never taken a call—or a punch to the gut—from a customer in their life. The guy who hasn’t seen sunlight in weeks, whose metrics punish him for empathy, and whose only crime was being born into needing a job to eat. He can’t quit. Can’t complain. Can’t even hope. Because the politicians back home didn’t just rob the coffers—they looted the screws holding the office chairs together. (Yeah. I’ve been that guy too).
Step 3: When you feel like being human again come back and let´s make shit happen.

📬 Contributions & Feedback

Pull requests are welcome. But bring real stuff—no fluff, no ego, no “let me just fix this comma” energy.
We’re building something better than the system here. Keep it sharp. Keep it human.

🔥 Final Words

This repo exists Because customers deserve better.

Because we can’t keep losing valuable insights to red tape and review queues.

Because I got tired of being told no.
No, that’s not formatted right.
No, that can’t go in the wiki.
No, that’s not aligned with our ingestion goals.

So here’s my yes:
Yes to clarity.
Yes to usefulness.
Yes to doing the right thing, even if it’s unofficial.

Test responsibly.
Document fiercely.
Fight the entropy.

Welcome to the somewhat controlled chaos.

Your friendly, burnt-the-f***-out MDE Support Engineer,
– Arkthos