We show that entanglement monotones reveal the pronounced enhancement of entanglement at a quantum phase transition, when they are sensitive to long-range high-order correlations. Such monotones are found to develop a sharp interferometric peak at the critical point, and to exhibit universal scaling. We demonstrate that similar features are shared by noise correlation spectra, and verify that these experimentally accessible quantities encode entanglement information and probe separability. We give a prescription, for mesoscopic scale systems of how to extract the pronounced enhancement of entanglement at a quantum phase transition from limited accessible experimental data. Copyright (C) EPLA, 2009