This paper presents a meter placement method for voltage sags monitoring in large transmission systems. An integer programming-based modeling is proposed for choosing the locations of power quality meters. A branch-and-bound-type algorithm is used to solve the optimization problem. A large transmission network is used to validate the method. Stochastic assessment of voltage sags is applied to the test network to obtain simulated monitoring results. Voltage sags system indexes are calculated from monitoring programs designed according to the optimization method. Comparisons with the system indexes obtained from a full monitoring program show the applicability of the method.