A maintenance strategy for stabilizing the reliability of machines or equipment. Its central theme involves directing corrective actions aimed at failure root causes, not active failure symptoms, faults, or machine wear conditions. A typical proactive maintenance regiment involves three steps: (1) setting a quantifiable target or standard relating to a root cause of concern (e. G. , a target fluid cleanliness level for a lubricant), (2) implementing a maintenance program to control the root cause property to within the target level (e. G. , routine exclusion or removal of contaminants), and (3) routine monitoring of the root cause property using a measurement technique (e. G. , particle counting) to verify the current level is within the target.