> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.periscope.sh/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Throughput

> PRs merged per week. A measure of your team's shipping cadence and development activity.

Throughput tracks the number of pull requests merged per week. It is the simplest measure of how much work your team is completing and shipping.

## What Periscope tracks

Periscope counts merged PRs from your monitored GitHub repositories. The dashboard shows:

* **Total PRs merged** in the selected time period
* **Average PRs per week**
* **Weekly breakdown** showing the merge count for each week

## How it works

Periscope counts merged PRs per week from your monitored GitHub repositories.

## Interpreting the data

* **Consistent throughput** week over week is a sign of healthy, predictable delivery.
* **Sudden drops** may indicate blockers, team holidays, planning sprints, or context switching.
* **Gradual decline** could signal accumulating tech debt, increasing PR size (fewer but larger PRs), or reduced team capacity.
* **Spikes** often correspond to deadline-driven work or sprint boundaries.

<Tip>
  Throughput is most useful when viewed alongside cycle time. If throughput is high but cycle time is also high, the team may be merging large, long-lived PRs rather than shipping small changes quickly.
</Tip>

### Throughput vs deployment frequency

| Metric                   | What it counts              | Tells you...                     |
| ------------------------ | --------------------------- | -------------------------------- |
| **Throughput**           | Merged PRs per week         | How much code is being completed |
| **Deployment frequency** | Production deploys per week | How much code is reaching users  |

A gap between throughput and deployment frequency means code is being merged but not deployed. This is common in teams with manual deployment processes, release trains, or staging bottlenecks. The [combined activity](/integrations/mcp) MCP tool overlays both on the same timeline to make gaps visible.

## MCP tool

Query throughput from your AI coding assistant:

```
get_throughput(time_range: "30d")
```

Returns total merged, average per week, and weekly breakdown data.