Real-time monitoring technique for process parameters and/or insight variables of chemical synthetic ingredients is a novel chemical process analysis method, which can real time monitor the chemical synthetic ingredients, reveal the mechanism of chemical reaction occurring, reaction courses and kinetic characteristics, and monitor, control and adjust chemical reaction to determine the endpoint of reaction and enhance selectivity of reaction, quality and yields of product. Many real-time monitoring techniques were achieved to satisfy the demands in several chemical synthetic reactions. The structure and principles of current real-time monitoring techniques was stated, and a review was summarized on its applications in chemical synthetic ingredients. The research, development and applications of real-time monitoring techniques such as spectrometry (i.e. ultraviolet-visible spectrophotometry, infrared spectrometry, Raman spectroscopy, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, mass spectrometry and fluorescence spectroscopy), chromatography (i.e. thin layer chromatography, gas chromatography, high performance liquid chromatography and capillary electrophoresis) and their coupled techniques (i.e. GC-MS, GC-IR and LC-MS) for chemical synthetic ingredients were evaluated. The coupled techniques were utilized to take the advantages of their high performance separation and quantitative power of chromatography, and sensitive and qualitative identification capacity of spectrometric techniques could realize the real-time monitoring for special chemical synthetic ingredients in complex systems. The future developmental trends and application prospects of real-time monitoring techniques are also discussed. With the research & development of microprocessor and embedded system, the real-time monitoring instrument for chemical synthetic ingredients will have a trend to miniaturization, intelligence, digitization, functionalization and multichannel with widely versatile and strongly compatible features.