1. A system for monitoring a plurality of assets, the assets comprising engineered systems or machines of the same type, the system comprising: at least one Local Computing Elements and a Central Computing Element, wherein: a. each of the plurality of assets generating asset data for monitoring of the asset condition or performance; b. each of the at least one Local Computing Elements, comprising a processor, is connected to a Local Data Repository receiving and storing the asset data as individual data records, wherein each of the individual data records comprises a plurality of data channels from a corresponding asset of the plurality of assets of the same type collected over a predetermined period of time; c. each of the at least one Local Computing Elements is connected to the Central Computing Element through a data link; d. each of the at least one Local Computing Elements pre-processes the individual data records in the Local Data Repository to produce compressed data, wherein the pre-processing of the monitoring data generated by each asset comprises computing time series of regression variable vectors, each regression variable vector comprising one or more dependent variables and one or more regressors variables, wherein the data record pre-processing comprises calculating an empirical covariance matrix for the regression variable vector from the data record and the compressed data include the empirical covariance matrixes, the compressed data being transmitted over the data link to the Central Computing Element; e. each of the individual data records being pre-processed separately and independently to produce the compressed data; f. the Central Computing Element collects, stores, and post-processes the compressed data from all Local Computing Elements to obtain monitoring reporting data, the monitoring reporting data being displayed or transmitted by the Central Computing Element as the monitoring system output; and g. the monitoring reporting data is computed based on a result of an optimal estimation of the model parameters for the plurality of the assets, the model parameters comprising model parameters for each of the assets, the model parameters and the monitoring reporting data computed by the Central Computing Element using compressed data from all the Local Computing Elements being the same as if all the asset monitoring data were simultaneously available and used for the optimal estimation of the model parameters.