If there was an award for the most common help desk related questions asked, it would go to one of these-

"Hey man, how many requests do we usually get on a daily basis?"

"The helpdesk guys look very busy. Are we getting a lot of requests lately?"

"There are so many unpicked requests in the queue. Do we need more people?"

Ironically, this is the most probable answer you would get to all these questions -  "Umm... I don't know.. I think so.. Let me find out"

I can help you give a concrete answer using  Analytics Plus. A request velocity report gives you the average number of requests that come into your helpdesk on a daily basis. This report can be altered to give you the request velocity on a weekly, quarterly, yearly basis. Using this report, you will be able to instantly know if the request volume is increasing and if you need to get more people to handle the load. 

Steps to recreate this report

You will need this formula to calculate the average number of incoming requests per day

Count("Request"."RequestID")/distinctcount(date("Request"."Created Time"))

Here is a quick video on how you can replicate this report. 

Click here to know more about Analytics Plus.