Microsoft Security Automation

What Microsoft Security Automation teaches: build Sentinel and Logic Apps playbooks that enrich alerts, collect evidence, and auto-contain threats across identity, endpoint, and cloud, so your SOC scales without scaling headcount. The playbook pipeline you'll build, the automation you walk away with, and how the course is structured. Start here.

Build your first automation rule and your first Sentinel playbook. Automation rules for triage acceleration, Logic Apps for multi-step enrichment, managed identity authentication, entity extraction, error handling, testing, monitoring, and cost management.

Build the enrichment pipeline that transforms every alert into an investigation-ready incident. IP reputation, user risk, device compliance, threat intelligence, alert history, geo-location, and impossible travel, all automated, all running in parallel, all completing in under 30 seconds. Watchlist-driven dynamic enrichment for VIP escalation, known-safe suppression, and high-risk priority boost. Performance tuning to meet production SLAs.

Build the evidence collection pipeline that captures volatile data at alert time, before session tokens expire, before processes terminate, before containment modifies the environment. Four evidence domains collected in parallel, three incident-type playbooks, evidence packaging with chain of custody, and collection timing that preserves what log retention cannot.

Build the notification pipeline that delivers the right information to the right people at the right severity, Teams adaptive cards for the SOC, escalation cascades for after-hours, MSSP coordination to prevent duplicate triage, regulatory flagging, fatigue prevention, and approval workflows with full audit trails.

Build the identity containment playbook that revokes sessions, surgically removes attacker MFA methods, activates emergency conditional access, revokes OAuth consents, and disables accounts, gated by confidence thresholds, VIP and service account safeguards, post-containment verification, and automated rollback.

Build the endpoint containment playbook that isolates compromised devices through Defender for Endpoint, collects forensic evidence before isolation, blocks malicious files fleet-wide, and applies the workstation-versus-server-versus-DC decision logic that prevents production outages.

Build the synchronized containment playbook that responds to attacks spanning cloud, endpoint, and network at once, parallel session revocation, device isolation, and IP blocking, with blast radius assessment, human approval gates, CHAIN-HARVEST and CHAIN-PRIVILEGE response, and breakout detection.

Build automation native to Microsoft Defender XDR, custom detection rules with auto-actions, Automated Investigation and Response, attack disruption, custom indicators, and the per-workload automation across MDO, MDI, and MDCA, plus the coordination model that keeps XDR and Sentinel from duplicating or conflicting.

Engineer KQL as the control layer for automation, queries as triggers, dynamic watchlists for runtime control, suppression with audit cycles, multi-signal correlation that composes confidence, health monitoring, hunting automation, evidence collection that avoids truncation, and the query library that keeps it all maintainable.

Build Azure Functions for automation that exceeds Logic Apps, TI enrichment with caching and retry, bulk remediation with dry-run safety, custom IOC feed processing with deduplication and expiry, evidence packaging with chain of custody, secure least-privilege architecture, and async Sentinel integration that does not block the pipeline.

Build the discipline that keeps automation trustworthy, the testing framework, staging workspace, safe containment testing, version control, change management, operational runbooks, audit trails, false positive impact analysis, and continuous improvement that prevent the untested playbook from disabling the CFO.

Turn automation capability into a sustained program, a dependency-ordered roadmap, leverage-based candidate selection, a team structure that survives turnover, business metrics, playbook library governance, MSSP coordination, compliance evidence, cost-benefit analysis, and the path to a mature operation.

Assemble the entire course into one working system, six automation phases from enrichment through governance, run a realistic multi-stage attack end to end, expose the bugs only integration testing reveals, measure the performance gain, and produce the reference architecture and business case for the automated SOC.

Automation patterns organized by what they do, each carrying the risk tier that decides whether it runs unattended.

Seven procedures for getting automation into production and keeping it there, each with a state to reach.

A lab with disposable targets, so containment automation can be tested without locking you out of the tenant running it.

Worked automation failures end to end, including the wrong turns and what would have made each answer different.

Response procedures for when the automation is the incident, with dispositions and a handoff artifact.

Where to practice building automation, and the one thing about this discipline no practice surface can give you.

The consolidated lookup and the step-by-step procedures from this course, in one place.

External sources this course draws on: vendor documentation, frameworks, standards, and research.

Security Automation end-of-course exam, a simulation-based assessment testing whether you can diagnose, contain, and remediate an automation failure under pressure, using the engineering and judgment built across all 14 modules.