The work is devoted to solving the problem of increasing reliability of cutting tools failures recognition. For this is proposed to carry out the following developments: the formation of sets of direct and indirect features of cutting tools states and failures; forming the corresponding state spaces; reducing their dimensionality by selecting the most informative features; construction of failures classifiers and necessary decision rules. The analysis of methods for selecting failures informative features is carried out, and the genetic method of features selecting is recommended for use.