Specific features of the enterprise competitiveness management (like real-time management) set up the need of replace of the occasional analytical work by the competitiveness monitoring system. When forming an information base for monitoring the competitiveness of an industrial enterprise, its sectoral features should be taken into account, therefore, the purpose of the article is to identify and justify industry specific features and principles for monitoring of the competitiveness of an industrial enterprise.The research is based on a dialectical approach to the study of the parameters of the enterprise's competitiveness, which are usually combined into an information base for monitoring with the selection of parameters: the market level of the competitiveness of the enterprise; production and economic level of the competitiveness of the enterprise; product level of the competitiveness of the enterprise.The industry-specific features that determine the specifics of the monitoring competitiveness of an enterprise are identified, namely: the features of the products (its science-consuming complexity, the complexity of the design, etc.); features of operational characteristics of the products; features of the main production processes; features of the technological base of the main production; features of the professional and qualification composition of employees; features of the organization of management processes in the enterprise.Disclosure of the main features of monitoring of the competitiveness of an industrial enterprise were related to establish and implement the principles for such monitoring.Therefore, the article formulates the principles of monitoring of the competitiveness of an industrial enterprise as the fundamental rules which establish a constant correlation of its elements and procedures that make up its essence.The principles of monitoring of the competitiveness of an industrial enterprise, supplemented by specific features, allow us to justify a set of investigated parameters of an industrial enterprise, to make a quantitative assessment of the current state of the object in comparison with past trends and to predict the future state of the object.