In this paper, the development of data-driven design of process monitoring and fault diagnosis (PM-FD) systems is reviewed and some recent results are presented. A major objective of this work is to sketch a process input-output data based framework of designing PM-FD systems for dynamic processes. The main focus of our study is on the data-driven design of observer-based PM-FD systems, which are, thanks to their high robustness and real-time ability, suitable for industrial applications. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.