> ### Investigating application performance issues

> With the aid of Fathom Management, you can follow a simple process to identify, understand, and address performance issues. This process involves:

> - Understanding your business requirements and reviewing them periodically.
> It is essential to have a thorough knowledge of your business needs, work practices, and acceptable and unacceptable trade-offs. Armed with this fundamental understanding, you can use Fathom-supplied data to proactively anticipate and plan for change, minimizing the effects of system problems on your business operations.

> - Defining your problem or goal clearly.
> Given your business and work practices, ask:

> - What problems do you want to anticipate or eliminate?
> - What performance goals would you like to achieve?
> Whatever the problem you want to minimize or eliminate, or the performance goal you want to achieve, define it in a straightforward, concise manner.

> - Reviewing Fathom-supplied data to investigate and analyze your problem or goal.
> Use your problem definition to review Fathom-generated information to better understand your problem. Through a process of elimination, you can evaluate the data and identify potential components that maybe contributing to a given problem.

> - Documenting the steps you perform to address your issues, and test all documented options that you generate.
> Not all problems or performance issues can be resolved immediately. Maintain a log of issues and a checklist of areas investigated to solve a given problem. Review them periodically and you may be able to improve on your original solution over time.

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