The emergence of interconnected cyber-physical systems and sensor/actuator networks has given rise to advanced automation applications, where a large amount of sensor data is collected and processed in order to make suitable real-time decisions and to achieve the desired control objectives. However, in situations where some components behave abnormally or become faulty, this may lead to serious degradation in performance or even to catastrophic system failures, especially due to cascaded effects of the interconnected subsystems. Distributed fault diagnosis refers to monitoring architectures where the overall system is viewed as an interconnection of various subsystems, each of which is monitored by a dedicated fault diagnosis agent that communicates and exchanges information with other “neighbouring” agents. The goal of this presentation is to provide insight into various aspects of the design and analysis of intelligent monitoring and control schemes and to discuss directions for future research.