--- title: "Highlight: Service Observability for Managed Networks" description: Highlight is a cloud service observability platform for MSPs. See how IPTel uses it to monitor Meraki, SD-WAN and ThousandEyes with AI forecasting. --- [Blog](https://blog.iptel.com.au) # [Highlight: Service Observability for Managed Networks](https://blog.iptel.com.au/highlight-service-observability) Written by [Mark McSherry](https://blog.iptel.com.au/author/mark-mcsherry) | 4 October 2026, 12:11:54 am Z When you run networks for lots of customers, collecting data isn't the hard part. The hard part is spotting which service is actually in trouble, fast enough to fix it before anyone notices. In this blog, we'll look at Highlight, the platform behind our managed services monitoring, what it shows our engineers and how its AI features help us stay ahead of problems. ## Highlight: What Is Service Observability? Service observability means watching the health of the services a network delivers — a site's internet link, its SD-WAN tunnels, its Wi-Fi — rather than thousands of raw device metrics. Highlight is a cloud-based service observability platform built for managed service providers, and it's the platform behind the monitoring in our [managed services](https://iptel.com.au/managed-services). Instead of a wall of graphs, each service and each location gets a tile that's green, amber or red. One glance tells our engineers what's working, what isn't and where to look first. Highlight is used by thousands of organisations across more than 100,000 locations worldwide, from large retailers to service providers. It's multi-tenant by design, so every customer's services stay separate while our team still gets the bird's-eye view. Related reading - [Building AI into our Managed Services with Highlight](https://blog.iptel.com.au/building-ai-into-our-managed-services) - [Cisco Powered Managed Services: What It Means for You](https://blog.iptel.com.au/cisco-powered-managed-services) ## Integrations: Which Technologies Does Highlight Monitor? Highlight monitors more than 85 vendor services through API and SNMP integrations. For the Cisco networks we look after, the ones that matter most are Cisco Meraki, Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN and ThousandEyes, so a whole estate — including any non-Cisco kit — can sit in one platform. Highlight connects to the Meraki Dashboard API, covering security appliances, switches, Wi-Fi access points and cellular gateways. It also gives end-to-end observability for Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN services, and it pulls in ThousandEyes Enterprise and Cloud agents through the ThousandEyes API, so digital experience sits alongside network health. Other vendors such as Fortinet, HPE Aruba and Extreme are supported too, with SNMP and ICMP poll watches covering everything else. For our customers, that means one monitoring service, whatever mix of kit is at each site. Related reading - [Meraki Managed Service: Inside the MSP Dashboard](https://blog.iptel.com.au/meraki-managed-service) - [ThousandEyes Managed Services: Networks You Don't Own](https://blog.iptel.com.au/thousandeyes-managed-services) ## Visibility: How Does Highlight Show Network Health? Heat Tiles show every service and location for a customer as a tile, each scored on stability, load and health. Grid View lays the same locations out against every service — underlay, tunnels, LAN and applications — so the exact fault stands out in seconds. Here's what that looks like for a typical multi-site customer (names changed). Everything is green except one branch, where load has been high for three hours: Switch to Grid View and the cause narrows straight away. The branch's tunnels, switching and underlay are all healthy; it's the Wi-Fi service that's under load. That matters most during an outage. When several sites go amber at once, the pattern points to a shared cause such as a carrier or cloud issue. When one site goes red, we go straight to that site and that service. Alerting follows the same idea, with one-minute polling and alerts tuned to what matters for each customer, which keeps false positives and alert storms down. **Pro-Tip:** Agree up front which services matter most at each site — the primary WAN link, the SD-WAN edge, guest Wi-Fi. Monitoring and alerting can then be tuned around those priorities instead of treating every interface the same. Related reading - [Incident Management in Managed Services: How It Works](https://blog.iptel.com.au/managed-services-incident-management) - [Managed Meraki SD-WAN: What the Service Covers](https://blog.iptel.com.au/managed-services-meraki-sd-wan) ## Power of AI: Capacity Forecasting & Anomaly Detection The Highlight roadmap will see two machine learning features to its monitoring. Capacity forecasting analyses historical traffic on each circuit to project future load and show when it's likely to reach capacity. Anomaly detection looks for sudden, unusual step changes in traffic and performance, separate from normal growth and everyday fluctuation. The illustration below shows both on one circuit: a short-lived step change flagged as an anomaly, and a forecast that crosses the capacity threshold in about five weeks. We're looking forward to seeing these in action once released. Both help us move from reacting to planning. A forecast lets a customer budget for a bandwidth upgrade weeks ahead instead of hearing about it from frustrated users. An anomaly is an early prompt to check a site, whether it turns out to be a fault, a change in how the site is used or something that needs a security review. Related reading - [Building AI into our Managed Services with Highlight](https://blog.iptel.com.au/building-ai-into-our-managed-services) - [Managed Service Pain Points and How to Avoid Them](https://blog.iptel.com.au/managed-service-customer-pain-points) ## Reporting: One View Across Every Technology Highlight brings data from every technology into unified reports, so a service review covers the whole network rather than one report per vendor. A reporting API also makes historic and summarised data available for tools such as Excel and Power BI. For our customers, that means clearer conversations about performance, capacity and where to invest next — backed by the same data our engineers use every day. Related reading - [Managed Services Q&A: Is It Right for Your Business?](https://blog.iptel.com.au/managed-services-qa) - [Managed Services FAQs Part 1: Support, Hardware and Skills](https://blog.iptel.com.au/managed-services-faq-part-1) ## Highlight: FAQs ### What Is Service Observability? Service observability means monitoring the health of the services a network delivers, such as a site's internet link or Wi-Fi, rather than only individual device metrics. It makes it easier to see what users are actually experiencing. ### Does Highlight Support Cisco Meraki, ThousandEyes and Webex? Yes. Highlight integrates with the Meraki Dashboard API and the ThousandEyes API, supports Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, and also monitors Webex through Webex Control Hub. ### Does Highlight Use AI? Yes. It uses machine learning for capacity forecasting on network circuits and for detecting anomalous changes in traffic and performance. ### Do I Need to Buy Highlight to Get This Monitoring? Highlight is the platform IPTel uses to deliver monitoring in its managed services. Talk to us about what's included for your network. ## Highlight: Summary Highlight gives IPTel one service-focused view of every network we manage, from Meraki and Catalyst SD-WAN to ThousandEyes and multi-vendor sites. Clear Heat Tiles and Grid View, tuned alerting, AI forecasting and anomaly detection, and unified reporting help us find issues sooner, fix them faster and plan ahead with our customers. ### Need Help With Managed Network Monitoring? We run [Network Assessments](https://score.iptel.com.au/network-assessment) if you'd like an independent look at your network first. If you'd like your network watched by a team that sees problems early, find out more about our [managed services](https://iptel.com.au/managed-services), [get in touch](https://iptel.com.au/contact-us) or email [sales@iptel.com.au](mailto:sales@iptel.com.au). [View full post](https://blog.iptel.com.au/highlight-service-observability) ```json { "@context" : "http://schema.org", "@type" : "BlogPosting", "author" : { "@type" : "Person", "name" : "Mark McSherry" }, "dateModified" : "2026-10-21T11:26:51.490Z", "datePublished" : "2026-10-04T00:11:54Z", "headline" : "Highlight: Service Observability for Managed Networks", "image" : { "@type" : "ImageObject", "height" : 800, "url" : "https://6831594.fs1.hubspotusercontent-ap1.net/hubfs/6831594/Blogs/Highlight/highlight-service-observability-square-feature.jpg", "width" : 800 }, "mainEntityOfPage" : "https://blog.iptel.com.au/highlight-service-observability", "publisher" : { "@type" : "Organization", "logo" : { "@type" : "ImageObject", "height" : 60.0, "url" : "https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/6831594/IP%20-%20CMYK_HiRes.jpg", "width" : 85.096954 }, "name" : "Blog" } } ```