The invention provides a self-service terminal state monitoring method and system, and relates to the technical field of equipment monitoring. The method comprises the steps that whether a monitoring server is in the busy state is detected, a secondary monitoring agent is established if the detection result is yes, a part of ATMs are assigned to be directly monitored by the secondary monitoring agent and the assigned ATMs are enabled to transmit subsequent state message to the secondary monitoring agent; and the secondary monitoring agent judges the received state messages and forwards the state messages representing the abnormal state or the state messages indicating change to the monitoring server to be processed. The secondary monitoring agent is dynamically established, and the ATM monitoring task is assigned to the secondary monitoring agent for entrusted monitoring so that the performance of the monitoring server can be improved, and thus dynamic capacity expanding of the monitoring server can be realized and the performance bottleneck of the monitoring server can be avoided.