With the continuous development of the terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) technique, the precision of the laser scanning has been improved which makes it possible that TLS could be used for high-precision deformation monitoring. A deformation monitorable indicator (DMI) should be determined to distinguish the deformation from the error of point cloud and plays an important role in the deformation monitoring using TLS. After the DMI determined, a scheme of the deformation monitoring case could be planned to choose a suitable instrument, set up a suitable distance and sampling interval. In this paper, the point error space and the point cloud error space are modelled firstly based on the point error ellipsoid. Secondly, the actual point error is derived by the relationship between the actual point cloud error space and the point error space. Then, the DMI is determined using the actual point error. Finally, two sets of experiments is carried out and the feasibility of the DMI is proved.