Monitoring the udder health of a dairy cow herd has three tasks: first, to determine the status quo, second, to monitor the effectiveness of improvement and treatment measures taken, and third, to detect problems at an early stage. A monitoring programme is therefore a continuous process for the collection, compilation and evaluation of data at individual animal and farm level. It must be distinguished from the one-off diagnostics carried out at herd level, which are usually carried out when problems occur in order to identify possible causes. Digital monitoring is the collection of data on the basis of numbers - usually using computer technology and statistical processing.