# Performance warnings and recommendations
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FSx for ONTAP displays a warning for CloudWatch metrics whenever one of these metrics has approached or crossed a predetermined threshold for multiple consecutive data points. These warnings provide you with actionable recommendations that you can use to optimize your file system's performance.

Warnings are accessible in several areas of the **Monitoring & performance** dashboard. All active or recent Amazon FSx performance warnings and any CloudWatch alarms configured for the file system that are in an ALARM state appear in the **Monitoring & performance** panel in the **Summary** section. The warning also appears in the section of the dashboard where the metric graph is displayed.

You can create CloudWatch alarms for any of the Amazon FSx metrics. For more information, see [Creating Amazon CloudWatch alarms to monitor Amazon FSx](creating_alarms.md).

## Use performance warnings to improve file system performance
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Amazon FSx provides actionable recommendations that you can use to optimize your file system's performance. These recommendations describe how you can address a potential performance bottle neck. You can take the recommended action if you expect the activity to continue, or if it's causing an impact to your file system's performance. Depending on which metric has triggered a warning, you can resolve it by increasing either the file system's throughput capacity or storage capacity, as described in the following table.

[\[See the AWS documentation website for more details\]](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/fsx/latest/ONTAPGuide/performance-insights-FSxN.html)

**Note**  
During an SSD decrease operation, write-heavy workloads could experience a temporary performance degradation as the operation consumes disk and network resources. To minimize performance impact, maintain adequate headroom by ensuring ongoing workloads don't consistently consume more than 50% CPU, 50% disk throughput, or 50% SSD IOPS before initiating an SSD decrease operation.  
Brief I/O pauses of up to 60 seconds might occur for each volume as client access is redirected to the new set of disks. These pauses are expected and normal during the cutover phase of the operation.

For more information about file system performance, see [Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP performancePerformance](performance.md).