It's far more likely the statement refers to a lack of user tickets, project requests, or compliance requirements as that's normally how IT finds out what to do next. I've never seen an IT staff with so little to do they are monitoring the network looking for packets for ideas of what they should implement next instead of implementing things they've been trying to get time for for the last 5 years. Link utilization maybe but that's a completely different beast.

Not to mention it's extremely hard to know how to check the statistic you described without becoming aware you don't have the things needed to generate the statistics so this reasoning kind of rules itself out with the exception of AAAA records - you'll actually see those requests even if all you have is A records on an IPv4 only DNS server.