Lab Days

Hands-on workshops where you learn by fixing realistic problems. Less slides, more terminal.

Register interest

How a Lab Day would run

An illustrative format, not a published schedule. Each scenario follows the same four stages.

  1. Brief

    You get the situation the way a real ticket arrives: incomplete, a bit vague, and urgent.

  2. Investigate

    You gather evidence in a prepared lab environment, with hints available if you get stuck.

  3. Fix and verify

    You make the change, then prove it worked. "It seems fine now" doesn’t count.

  4. Debrief

    Walk back through what happened, what the evidence showed, and what to watch for next time.

Example scenarios

Illustrative scenarios showing the kind of problems Lab Days would cover. They are not scheduled sessions.

Illustrative scenario

The Monday-morning outage

Half the office can’t reach the intranet. The other half can. Nothing changed over the weekend, according to everyone.

You'd practise

  • Splitting a problem in half
  • DNS resolution and caching
  • Certificate expiry

Illustrative scenario

New starter, no access

A new employee’s laptop arrived, they can sign in to Windows, but Outlook and SharePoint refuse them.

You'd practise

  • Reading sign-in logs
  • Conditional Access results
  • Intune compliance status

Illustrative scenario

The server that filled up

A Linux web server stopped accepting uploads overnight. The application error message isn’t helpful.

You'd practise

  • Disk usage investigation
  • Service logs with journalctl
  • Preventing a repeat

Illustrative scenario

Automate the onboarding checklist

Every new device gets the same twelve manual checks. Turn them into one script someone else can run.

You'd practise

  • Scripting safe checks
  • Readable output
  • Version control basics

The environment

Every exercise runs in a disposable lab: virtual machines, test tenants and simulated networks. Never real production systems.

Before you join

Each scenario lists its own prerequisites. A good warm-up is the connectivity drill.