In order to improve the efficiency maintenance, reduce the maintenance costs and save energy, city lighting monitoring system based on IEC61850 was proposed according to the status of domestic city lighting facilities. First, this system introduced some important technologies, such as IEC61850V, Vxworks development platform, Sqilte database and GoaheadServer. Second, the specific methods and the communication mode were discussed, and finally, following contents were introduced, such as real-time monitoring of lighting, integration of monitoring information, transmission protocol and the standardization of communication network. It has a certain significance to improve the overall management level of city-lighting facilities.