We have proposed and demonstrated a new optical monitoring technique based on scanning the gain (or loss) profiles of the erbium-doped fiber amplifiers for WDM networks. The maximum measured error of less than or equal to 0.31 dB, the sensitivity of -50 dBm, and the dynamic range of 34 dB have been achieved experimentally for a 4-channel demonstration. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.