This cumulative counter tracks how many times the port's congestion has escalated one level further, from severely-congested to absolutely-congested, since the last reset, the worst congestion transition tracked on this interface. An admin treats a rising lportAbsCongests as more urgent than lportSevCongests since it means the port is repeatedly hitting its most extreme discard state, likely dropping red and amber traffic per lportSevereThreshold. For example, a port showing zero lportSevCongests but nonzero lportAbsCongests would be unusual and worth double-checking, since normally severe precedes absolute congestion.