When you look past the helpdesk workflows, the complex system of SLAs, those custom forms and rules that you spent so much time building, the fundamental function of your helpdesk is to resolve or close incoming requests in the shortest time possible. For your helpdesk to function efficiently, there needs to be a constant stream of requests being closed in order to make room for new requests. One of the primary metrics that you need to watch out for is the ratio of incoming requests against the number of requests being closed. This ratio is what we call the Burn Rate .