Applying cold production to heavy oil reservoirs is one of the hottest technologies of the present oil exploration, which can improve the yield of oil wells substantially. However, excessive sanding can damage the production equipment while excessive sand prevention can decrease the efficiency of the yield. Both of them in actual production can bring problems. In order to seek the optimal solutions in sand production and sand prevention, and achieve sand management in oil wells, a set of sand monitoring systems for real time monitoring are needed to show sand information continuously and effectively to provide optimal strategy. According to the research of sand monitoring technology worldwidely, different sand monitoring methods such as ultrasonic methods, ER methods, surface monitoring and underground monitoring, equipments such as ClampOn system, CorrOcean system and Landy system, and signal processing methods such as FFT, WT and EMD are introduced. Characteristics of these methods and facilities are analyzed, and the importance of sand monitoring and the development trends of sand monitoring are put forward.