Overview
Pensero connects to Confluence to make engineering work visible beyond code.
Design reviews, PRDs, technical specs, and engineering notes are treated as first-class delivery. Pensero groups documents with related code, tickets, and collaboration to build a complete work for each person, team, and period.
Only work-related content is processed. Unrelated information remains private.
What Pensero Reads
Pensero reads document content and metadata only from the Confluence spaces you explicitly connect. It does not access private spaces, unrelated content, or data outside the selected scope.
Pensero retrieves:
Title: Name of the page or document
Content: Text contained in the document
Document Type: Page or database entry
Repository: Confluence space where the document is stored
Created By: Document author
Parent Document: If the page belongs to a hierarchy
MIME Type: Indicates the type of embedded file, when applicable
Confluence does not expose block-level authorship or detailed change history via its API.
Documents are treated as delivery units and evaluated based on their contribution, not their length.
Pensero supports organizations that operate multiple Confluence workspaces within the same company, enabling centralized and consistent delivery analysis.
Important: Pensero only measures documents created by existing Pensero users.
How Confluence documents are used in Pensero
Pensero analyzes documents to understand:
The problem being solved and its scope
The complexity of the work, including design and coordination effort
How documents contribute to delivery alongside code, tickets, and reviews
Documents are evaluated using the same framework as other work: magnitude and complexity, not raw volume.
This ensures documentation work is visible, comparable, and fairly represented in delivery and collaboration metrics.
Adding Your Confluence Workspace (Step-by-Step)
Setup takes a few minutes and does not require changes to how your team works. Transparency is core to Pensero. You can always review exactly what is being ingested.
Step 1 - Go to Integrations and Click “Connect”
Open the Integrations page from the left sidebar, find Confluence in the list of integrations and select Connect to begin the setup.
Step 2 - Authorize Pensero
Select the Confluence workspace you wish to connect and authorize access.
Important: Pensero only ingests Confluence spaces and pages that the connected Atlassian user can already access. It does not grant access to content outside those permissions.
Step 4 - Grant Permissions
Authorize the required permissions. Permissions can be adjusted later from your Atlassian Account settings.
Pensero will only be able to read Confluence content that the connected user already has access to. Private or restricted spaces outside that user’s access will not be ingested.
Pensero will begin syncing documents automatically.
Adding New Workspaces Later
You can connect additional Confluence workspaces at any time.
Step 1 - Go to Integrations
Open the Integrations page from the left sidebar and click your Confluence workspace.
Step 2 - Add Workspaces
Click Manage Access and select the workspace you want Pensero to access. Confirm by clicking Allow access.
Pensero will ingest newly added documents during the next sync.
How to Review Synced Confluence Documents
You can verify everything being ingested by navigating to:
Integrations → Document integrations → [Your Confluence Workspace]
In this page, you can review for each document:
Title
Creator
State
Date
This helps ensure all expected pages are synced correctly and that nothing important is missing.
Because Confluence does not expose full edit history via its API the way Notion does, Pensero cannot reliably attribute historical contributions on the first import.
How Pensero Handles Document Updates
Pensero syncs Confluence documents periodically and checks for new or updated content on each sync.
On the first time a document is fetched, Pensero can only see the latest document state.
As a result, the last editor at the time of that first fetch receives the delivery attribution for that import.
After the first fetch, Pensero stores versions locally.
On subsequent edits, Pensero compares the latest version against the previous stored version to compute the delta.
Delivery is attributed to new or changed content only, and assigned to the user who made that update.
Why attribution differs by document tool
Delivery attribution depends on what each platform’s API exposes.
Notion supports more granular authorship signals (block-level), while Confluence primarily exposes document-level updates.
Pensero uses the most accurate signals available per integration given these API limitations.
Example: how document updates affect delivery points
Alex creates a Performance Review document on Apr 8. Pensero records a delivery point for Alex on Apr 8.
Ben reviews and updates the same document on Apr 14, 6 days later.
Pensero moves Alex's delivery point from Apr 8 to Apr 14, and records Ben as a collaborator. Both Alex and Ben get delivery points reflecting their respective contributions to the document.
If Ben had updated the document on May 10 instead, more than 30 days after Apr 8, Pensero would keep Alex's original delivery point on Apr 8 and create a new delivery point on May 10. Ben would receive delivery points for that new contribution.
Workaround for First Imports of Older Docs
If the first import attributes too much to the last editor (because the doc already existed and had prior history), you can manually adjust the score to compensate.
This is not ideal, but it is the fairest way to correct legacy documents given Confluence API constraints.
Troubleshooting Issues
Why are Confluence documents not showing in Pensero?
Pensero connects Confluence documents to team members by matching their Confluence identity to their Pensero profile. Whether this match happens automatically depends on each user's Confluence privacy settings.
How the matching works
When Pensero fetches documents from Confluence, we request the contributor's username and email from the Confluence API. If both are available, we match the document to the correct Pensero user automatically.
However, Confluence allows users to control the visibility of their profile information. If a user has set their profile to private, the Confluence API does not return their email address or username. When this happens, Pensero cannot match that user automatically, and their documents show as unlinked.
What happens when a user's email is not available from the API
The user's Confluence activity will appear in the Unlinked tab in Pensero, showing the username or identifier that Confluence did return, but without a match to any Pensero profile. Their documents will not contribute to their delivery score until the link is made manually.
This is the most common reason a team member can have Confluence activity in the system that is not showing up in their Pensero profile.
How to fix it
Use the Unlinked tab to identify affected users
Go to Organization → Users → Unlinked and filter by Documents. Any user appearing there has Confluence activity that is not yet linked to a Pensero profile.
From the Unlinked tab you can:
See how many unlinked documents each user has
Search for the correct Pensero profile and link them
If the user doesn't appear in the search, check that they have been added to Pensero first.