Monitoring is an issue of primary concern in current and next generation networked systems. For example, the objective of sensor networks is to monitor their surroundings for a variety of different applications like atmospheric conditions, wildlife behavior, and troop movements among others. Similarly, monitoring in data networks is critical not only for accounting and management, but also for detecting anomalies and attacks. Such monitoring applications are inherently continuous and distributed, and must be designed to minimize the communication overhead that they introduce. In this context we introduce and study a fundamental class of problems called "thresholded counts" where we must return the aggregate frequency count of an event that is continuously monitored by distributed nodes with a user-specified accuracy whenever the actual count exceeds a given threshold value. In this paper we propose to address the problem of thresholded counts by setting local thresholds at e...