•Increasing interest in the application of structural health monitoring.•Structural health monitoring and non-destructive testing for timber structures.•Case studies of monitoring of timber structures.•Survey about monitoring of timber structures. Significant developments in structural health monitoring (SHM) and in non-destructive testing (NDT) and damage identification techniques for structural timber elements have led to an increasing interest in the application of these technologies. However, specific aspects of timber structures (anisotropy, moisture dependency, high variability), the wide range and novelty of available systems, and the need to adapt them for each configuration, makes specifying and implementing a SHM system a non-trivial task, heavily dependent on previous experience. This article presents a comprehensive review of available SHM and NDT methods, case studies, and a survey on the implementation of SHM in timber structures.