Water conservancy facilities play an important role in the flood control, irrigation and water resources scheduling, monitoring the operating status of the hydraulic machinery and equipment systems in these facilities is of great significance. Currently, the existing monitoring schemes usually target at a single sensor or a single structure, lacking of the research on the optimal allocation of sensors at the monitoring points of the overall system. Here, we constructed a hierarchical model based on the common fault types of typical hydraulic radial gates and hoists. With this model, evaluation indices of the optimal allocation of monitoring point sensors were discussed, and then their individual weights were assigned using the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP), finally the optimal allocation scheme of sensors at the monitoring points of the hydraulic machinery and equipment system was determined. The results show that the proposed scheme is suitable for the application scenario of sensor allocation at monitoring points of the hydraulic machinery and equipment system. This study can provide a theoretical basis for the structural health monitoring of hydraulic machinery and equipment systems. The proposed scheme can avoid blindness in the overall sensor layout of the system, it is more holistic and feasible compared to the conventional schemes.