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The hydropower units have a complex structure, complicated and changing working conditions, complexity and a diversity of faults. Effectively evaluating the healthy operation status and accurately predicting the failure for the hydropower units using the real-time monitoring data is still a difficult problem. To this end, this paper proposes a prediction method for the early failure of hydropower units based on Gaussian process regression (GPR). Firstly, by studying the correlation between different monitoring data, nine state parameters closely related to the operation of hydropower units are mined from the massive data. Secondly, a health evaluation model is established based on GPR using the historical multi-dimensional monitoring information and fault-free monitoring data at the initial stage of unit operation. Finally, a condition monitoring directive based on the Mahalanobis distance (MD) is designed. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by several typical examples of monitoring data of a hydropower station in Guangxi, China. The results show that, in three cases, the abnormal conditions of the unit are found 2 days, 4 days and 43 days earlier than those of regular maintenances respectively. Therefore, the method can effectively track the change process of the operation state of hydropower units, and detect the abnormal operation state of hydropower units in advance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]