A mechanical seal is a common type of rotating shaft seal in rotating machinery and plays a key role in the fluid seal of rotating machinery, such as centrifugal pumps and compressors. Given the performance degradation caused by the wear to the face of the contact mechanical seal during operation and the lack of effective predictive maintenance monitoring methods and evaluation indexes, a method for measuring the acceleration of the mechanical seal face’s vibration was pro-posed. The influence of face performance degradation and rotational speed change on the tribo-logical regime of the mechanical seal was investigated. The proposed fault detection model based on support vector data description (SVDD) was constructed. A mechanical seal face degradation test rig verifies the usability of the proposed method. The results show that in the mixed lubrication (ML) regime, the vibration sensitivity of the face increases with the increase in rotational speed. With the decrease in the face performance, the vibration-sensitive characteristic parameters of the face in-crease and change from the ML regime to the boundary lubrication (BL) regime. The incipient fault detection model can warn about incipient faults of mechanical seals. Here, the axial detection result predicted that maintenance would be required 10.5 months earlier than the actual failure time, and the radial and axial detection results predicted required maintenance 12 months earlier than the actual failure.