Highlight integrates Cisco ThousandEyes for enhanced monitoring

Highlight has announced the integration of Cisco ThousandEyes into its Service Observability Platform. This new integration aims to significantly enhance digital experience monitoring capabilities, providing a comprehensive view of network performance.

Highlight’s Service Observability Platform will now incorporate data from ThousandEyes, simplifying and presenting it in a service-oriented format. This integration will allow users to view digital experience data alongside underlay connectivity, overlay MPLS or SD-WAN, and switch or WiFi LAN infrastructure. The integration is designed to offer a full graphical display of network performance, making it accessible to both non-technical and highly skilled users such as engineers, operational managers, and service teams.

Digital experience monitoring is crucial for organisations to evaluate how users interact with critical applications. By integrating this data with Highlight, both service providers and IT departments will be able to identify and address issues proactively. The platform facilitates sharing real-time and historical information on ThousandEyes Agents and application tests, with unlimited multi-tenancy and granular role-based access control.

Martin Saunders, COO of Highlight, commented on the new integration: "We’re delighted to extend our support of Cisco technologies to include ThousandEyes. Highlight combined with ThousandEyes makes digital experience monitoring scalable and dependable for modern IT organisations and service providers alike. We don’t recreate the ThousandEyes dashboard but rather deliver the digital experience information in context with other core network information. This combination enables faster and more precise problem identification, with direct links to the ThousandEyes dashboard for deeper investigation."

He further explained the importance of historical data for trend analysis, adding, "To have full observability of a network and the digital experience, organisations require historical data for trend analysis. Highlight’s reporting engine summarises and presents historical digital experience data alongside supporting network information via flexible and intuitive reports. For service providers, this means we can help facilitate their conversations with customers about how their critical applications are performing, enabling them to focus on any areas with issues and then drill down into the detail."

Luke Maxwell, Head of Technical Support at ITGL, also expressed enthusiasm about the integration: "We use the Highlight Service Observability Platform to enhance the services we deliver to our 200+ customers, including NHS Trusts, universities, colleges, and private sector companies. The addition of ThousandEyes to Highlight will further strengthen our managed service offering, enabling us to insert the digital experience into our overall network view to deliver the full picture."

"If a customer experiences a delay or fault with an application, we will be able to quickly identify if any area of the network is involved. The combination of Highlight and ThousandEyes enables us to easily understand the context of an issue and share more detailed reports with our customers," said Maxwell.

The integration is facilitated through a secure API, which allows for a quick setup and scales to support thousands of devices and tests. Highlight manages all aspects of the platform, giving customers the freedom to focus on their core business activities.

Highlight’s cloud-based SaaS platform has been continuously developed for over two decades. It provides an intuitive user experience and a range of features tailored for both service providers and enterprise organisations. The platform collects and analyses complex network data, translating it into an accessible web portal.