Condition monitoring (CM) has been widely applied in most of the modern process as well as manufacturing industries as a predictive maintenance tool for incipient fault detection and trouble shooting but the interval at which the measurements are to be taken to achieve the best results has not yet been rationally discussed. This paper suggests a method for designing condition monitoring measurement intervals for all types of machines, from commissioning to replacement, by considering various factors such as risk, interval availability, debugging, useful life and wear-out regions of the failure rate curve, as well as economic factors governing the replacement prospects of the machine