Hey There Bill,

These are very good questions, and I'm pretty sure I have a solution for you regarding this! Within Explore we have a metric you can used called "Assigned unsolved tickets" this should pull all open, assigned tickets and if you were to add a filter for the date (I recommend using Ticket Requester Last updated), and Assignee name to your filter.

The Assigned Unsolved Tickets metric is here: ( IF ([Assignee ID] != NULL AND [Ticket status - Unsorted] != "Solved" AND [Ticket status - Unsorted] != "Closed") THEN [Ticket ID] ENDIF ).

For the second question to create a monthly report for your solved tickets you would need to use the date filter "Tickets Solved - Month"; I would recommend using the advanced filter to specify a repeated date range. Please see below;

That would be correct about the backlog feature, this feature will show you a snapshot of unsolved tickets at any given date, you could equally build this within the backlog tickets data set, but that is a bit more rigid and depends heavily on daily syncs. The other downside that I can think of off-hand would be that Backlog metrics can only be filtered or sliced by attributes that exist within the Support: Backlog History. This is because the backlog dataset is isolated and does not connect to other data in Zendesk.

You can Explore both options equally to see what jives best with you, and if you have any additional questions definitely follow-up!