Condition monitoring (CM) encounters a large data problem due to sensors that measure vibration data with a continuous, and sometimes, high sampling rate. In this study, compressive sensing approaches for condition monitoring are proposed to demonstrate the efficiency in handling a large amount of data and to improve the damage detection capability of the current condition monitoring process. Compressive sensing is a novel sensing/sampling paradigm that takes much fewer samples compared to traditional sampling methods. For the experiments a built-in rotating system was used and all data were compressively sampled to obtain compressed data. Optimal signal features were then selected without the reconstruction process and were used to detect and classify damage. The experimental results show that the proposed method could improve the data processing speed and the accuracy of condition monitoring of rotating systems