The diagnosis of viral diseases in animals and human is a challenge as viral infection appears in syndrome varying from acute to chronic, mild to fulminating or fatal to latent disease situation. The veterinary and medical professionals providing therapeutics get completely dependent on the diagnostic laboratories for confirmation of viral diseases. Therefore, availability of rapid, reliable and sensitive diagnostic assays for detecting viral pathogen become essential. The newer diagnostic techniques such as polymerase chain reaction (PCR), Real-time PCR, PCR-ELISA, Loop mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) assay, nucleic acid sequence based amplification (NASBA), DNA microarray, and nucleic acid sequencing etc. are offering comparatively more sensitive, reliable, rapid, user friendly, cheap and high throughput diagnosis over conventional methods. The futuristic techniques such as automated PCR, Ligase chain reaction (LCR), Quantum dots are in stage of infancy in viral disease diagnosis. These tests may be proved valuable in diagnosis, monitoring and surveillance of various viral pathogens as well as in effective implementation of disease control programme for avian influenza, foot and mouth disease and other animal disease outbreaks. The review discusses these modern diagnostic tests used in veterinary viral disease diagnosis.