This paper proposes a new method to diagnose the system fault of the process industry based on the monitor data set of distributed control system (DCS). Firstly, it defines a homeomorphism product space named color phase space which is a Cartesian product of two-dimensional Euclidean space and three-dimensional color phase space. Secondly, it maps the DCS data to the color phase space in order to get a system color-spectrum which displays the inherent relationship of the whole system. Then, it diagnoses the system fault by observing the color change on the color-spectrum depending on the physiological characteristics that human’s eyes are more sensitive for the color change than data change. © 2016, Shanghai Jiaotong University and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.