The present application discloses a monitoring method and apparatus. A specific implementation of the method comprises: reading information about monitoring data acquisition methods of monitored objects, the monitoring data acquisition method comprising an active acquisition method and a passive acquisition method; executing following steps for each of the monitored objects having the active acquisition method as the monitoring data acquisition method: generating a monitoring data acquisition task of the monitored object; determining a monitoring data acquisition frequency of the monitored object; and adding the monitoring data acquisition task to to-be-executed monitoring data acquisition task sets in a defined period corresponding to the monitoring data acquisition frequency; executing, in successive defined periods, monitoring data acquisition tasks in the corresponding to-be-executed monitoring data acquisition task sets; and parsing acquired monitoring data of the monitored objects to generate a monitoring result. The implementation solves the problem of high system resource occupation and waste of system resources during the monitoring process.