Abstract: This survey reviews foreign progress of monitoring on dam safely in the 80’s, sums up their development characteristics, lists related inter-national conferences and publications, and mirrors the recognition on safety monitoring of some countries. In this paper, observation arrangement of dam foundation and behavior analysis results, improvements of instruments and methods of deformation and seepage, development of automatic observation system in some developed countries and technical progression of mathematical models and backfeed analysis in recently ten years are explained in particular. The existing problems and the further prospects in the 90’s are pointed lastly.?