Laser materials processing has already been established for many years in industrial application, especially in the applications of welding, cutting, or drilling. During the recent years many other applications like additive manufacturing, structuring or short pulse processing for the micro and nano scale have come into play. All these laser processes have in common that they need high precision handling systems and properly set processing parameters. In case of small deviations from the set parameters, which may have many different reasons, the processing result might be faulty or at least out of the expected boundaries. Therefore it has since been an issue to control the process by online monitoring the laser, handling system and especially the process itself. This contribution will describe the current state-of-art and new developments in research of laser process monitoring. Just during the recent years the development of process monitoring and control systems has reached a status where real process features and parameters can be measured directly. The former approaches of detecting process emissions and thus deriving information about the manufactured quality is now replaced by the measurement of real process features. This can be achieved by the use of cameras, spectroscopic detectors, temperature signals or even combinations of individual signal sources.