The cutting tool condition drives the economy of machining processes in manufacturing industry. The failures in cutting tool are unbearable and affect the drive of machine tool which reduces life. Hence it necessitates reducing power consumption using monitoring cutting tool condition and hence requires an efficient supervision to monitor and predict faults. Simply stated, the condition which curtails cutting tool life highlighted before it turns into a tool wear, breakage and failure. This ensures optimized and effective use of a cutting tool, saves maintenance/repair time, enhances constancy in a process etc. The recent development in Machine Learning (ML) and its applicability for condition monitoring approach has drawn attention of researchers. Machine learning examines existing and past indications to predict conditions in future. This paper presents machine learning based condition monitoring of milling cutter of vertical machining centre (VMC). The vibration signals acquisition of 4 insert milling cutter is carried out with healthy and various fault conditions. The Visual Basic (VB) code and script is used to extract statistical features and decision tree algorithm is used to select relevant features. The different conditions of milling cutter are classified using tree family classifiers. The effort made in this work is to check applicability of ML approach for milling cutter fault diagnosis for reducing power consumption of drive of machine tool. © 2019 IOP Publishing Ltd. All rights reserved.