Abstract: Monitoring and early warning have become the important means of preventing geohazards with rapid development in technology. A great deal of financial, manpower and physical resources have been adopted to work on landslide monitoring and early warning. However, some technical and managerial personnel have misunderstandings in landslide monitoring and early warning, which seriously affects the geohazards prevention and mitigation effects. Based on research results and lessons learned in practice over recent years, this paper discusses on some basic issues in terms of landslide monitoring and early warning. Main points include:(1)It is not that more monitoring locations and methods are better. The landslide monitoring plan should highlight pertinence, practicability and purpose, and its design and content mainly provide the basis for landslide early warning; (2)The occurrence for many landslides is sudden, and monitoring equipment with self-adaptive data acquisition function should be used to get entire deformation data, especially the accelerated creep stage, to guarantee scientific alert. (3)Monitoring is just a means to an end, while early warning is the end goal. Much attention should be paid on landslide early warning, like regional-scale meteorological early warning and slope-scale landslide early warning; (4)The commonly used early warning models with thresholds have a high rate of false and missing alarms. The study on statistical analysis of historical data, early warning models based on key parameters of deformation, underground water level and precipitation, become a high priority to improve the accuracy and practicality of landslide early warning.