Network Monitoring With Highlight

How We Monitor

Highlight Is the Platform Behind Our Managed Services Monitoring

Highlight is a cloud-based service observability platform built for managed service providers. We use it to monitor every network we manage, whichever managed service domains you choose.

Highlight watches the services your network delivers, such as a site's internet link, its SD-WAN tunnels and its Wi-Fi, rather than thousands of raw device metrics. Our engineers see which service is in trouble and where to look first, and you see the same picture on your own dashboard.

For a closer look at the platform, read our blog on Highlight service observability.

One-Minute Polling
85+ Vendor Integrations
Your Own Live Dashboard
Unified Reporting

What You Get

How We Use Highlight

Service Health at a Glance

Heat Tiles score every service and site on stability, load and health, shown as green, amber or red.

Grid View

Every location laid out against underlay, tunnels, LAN and applications, so the faulty service stands out in seconds.

Tuned Alerting

One-minute polling, with alerts tuned to the services that matter at each site to keep false positives and alert storms down.

WAN and Voice Performance

Availability, latency, packet loss and utilisation on monitored primary and backup links, plus voice quality (MOS) tests.

Wi-Fi and Cellular

Client signal quality, radio channel utilisation and cellular signal strength, alongside the wired network.

Unified Reporting

One report across every technology for your service reviews, with a reporting API for Excel and Power BI.

Integrations

Cisco Meraki: Meraki Dashboard API: MX security appliances, MS switches, MR access points and MG cellular gateways
Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN: End-to-end observability of SD-WAN services
ThousandEyes: Enterprise and Cloud agents through the ThousandEyes API
Webex: Webex devices and services through Webex Control Hub
Other vendors: Fortinet, HPE Aruba, Extreme and more, across more than 85 vendor services
Everything else: SNMP and ICMP poll watches

Service Tiers

How Monitoring Grows With Your Tier

Highlight monitoring is part of every operational tier. What changes as you step up is the hours we respond, the depth of observability and how often you get reports.

Business hours

Essential

Monitoring and incident response during business hours, with quarterly reporting.

Extended business hours

Advanced

Adds enhanced observability through Highlight, extended hours cover and monthly reporting.

24x7x365

Critical

Adds 24x7 incident response, a named Level 3 engineer and executive reporting.

Why IPTel

Monitoring You Can See

Audited Cisco Powered Provider

Cisco independently audits our tools, processes, engineering practice and customer outcomes every year. Our delivery model is verified, not self-declared.

One Shared Picture

Your Highlight dashboard shows the same device health, performance and open incidents our engineers work from, and our customer portal shows every ticket, change and report.

Separate by Design

Highlight is multi-tenant, so your services stay separate from every other customer while our team keeps the bird's-eye view.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Highlight?

Highlight is a cloud-based service observability platform built for managed service providers. It's used by thousands of organisations across more than 100,000 locations worldwide, and it's the platform IPTel uses to monitor the networks we manage.

Do we get access to Highlight?

Yes. Managed services customers get a live dashboard of device health, performance and open incidents across their sites. Tickets, changes and reports sit alongside it in our customer portal.

Do we need to buy Highlight ourselves?

No. Highlight is the platform IPTel uses to deliver monitoring in our managed services. During transition we install a lightweight Highlight collector at each site and confirm every device is polling before go-live. You provide the virtual machine, small appliance or cloud instance the collector runs on, and we install, configure and operate the collector software.

Does Highlight monitor non-Cisco equipment?

Yes. It supports more than 85 vendor services, including Fortinet, HPE Aruba and Extreme, with SNMP and ICMP watches for anything else. Our Non-Cisco Devices service covers the management side.

Does Highlight use AI?

Capacity forecasting and anomaly detection are on the Highlight roadmap. Forecasting projects when a circuit is likely to reach capacity, and anomaly detection flags sudden, unusual changes in traffic and performance.

Can we get the data into our own reports?

Yes. Highlight's reporting API makes historic and summarised data available for tools such as Excel and Power BI.