This paper presents a literature review on the subject of Condition-Based Maintenance of surge arresters. Both a bibliometric analysis and traditional comprehensive research are presented. The bibliometric analysis is useful for obtaining insights about the literature. It quantitatively highlights relationships between journals, authors and keywords (related to the monitoring methods) and reveals future trends for research based on the timeline of the keywords. The traditional comprehensive literature review is also presented. It summarizes the methods, their advantages and disadvantages and also points to some known measurement issues of the methods. Both online (leakage current, harmonic components, temperature, partial discharges, power loss and the counting of discharges) and offline (reference voltage, residual voltage, insulation resistance, polarization/depolarization, return voltage, microscopy, spectrometry, X-ray, RUS and the recent application of FRA) methods have been qualitatively analyzed.