Help Desk Simulator

What it is

Help Desk Simulator is a training tool I built to practice the identity-and-access work that fills a real help desk queue. It presents a stream of tickets in a game-like interface, but the tickets aren't backed by fake, disposable data — each one maps to a real task against a live Microsoft Entra tenant. Resolve the ticket correctly and the tenant actually changes; get it wrong and the tenant is still the source of truth, so there's nowhere to hide.

Why I built it

Most lab exercises let you practice against sample data that resets the moment you close the tab. That's fine for memorizing steps, but it doesn't build the instinct you need when the system of record is real. I wanted something that would force me to learn cloud identity properly — and to make it stick, I turned the practice into a game so working through tickets feels like progress rather than a chore.

How it connects to Entra

The simulator authenticates to the tenant through an app registration and talks to it over the Microsoft Graph API. Wiring that up meant getting comfortable with app registrations, delegated and application permissions, and — most importantly — scoping: the "game" is only granted the access it genuinely needs, so it can touch the users and groups it's meant to and nothing else. That careful permission scoping ended up being one of the most valuable lessons in the whole project.

What I practiced

The ticket scenarios cover the bread-and-butter of identity support — password resets, account unlocks, and fixing group membership — the same reset-this, unlock-that, fix-the-access work that a help desk handles every day. Because the tenant is the real backend, I also got hands-on with how those changes propagate and how to verify a fix actually took, rather than just assuming it did.