The existing marine diesel engine fault diagnosis methods mainly have the problems of model complexity, large amount of calculation, and unable to carry out real-time fault diagnosis of diesel engine. In this paper, a simple and practical approach to detect faults of marine diesel engine is studied. According to a set of sensing data, the fitting equation of each parameter changing with the running state of diesel engine was fitted statistically. Then, the threshold range of each parameter changing with the running state of diesel engine was fitted. During fault diagnosis, the real-time parameters of the sensor in the current running state were calculated according to the real-time running data. If the parameters exceed the threshold range, it is abnormal operation. Because the sensor signal corresponds to the operation status of each specific component, the abnormal evaluation directly indicates the specific fault. Experimental results show that the method has a good practical effect.