Performance defects in Pega rarely present as a single, obvious fault. A slow harness render, an unexpected stage transition, a case that opens correctly but saves slowly, or a data page that intermittently returns stale values can all originate in very different layers of the runtime. Effective diagnosis depends on separating timing, execution flow, and in-memory state instead of treating them as one problem. That distinction is exactly why PAL, Tracer, and Clipboard remain the most practical diagnostic combination in Pega. PAL exposes cumulative and incremental resource usage for a requestor session without adding measurement overhead of its own. Tracer reconstructs the sequence of rule execution events but is intentionally heavyweight. And Clipboard reveals the runtime pages and property values that drive case behavior. Used together and in the right order, these tools turn debugging from guesswork into a disciplined tuning workflow.