This 64-bit counter tallies the total byte volume, not just packet count, matched by this rule globally, giving a sense of the actual traffic weight a rule is handling -- useful since a rule matching many small packets versus one matching fewer but much larger packets can represent very different amounts of real network load. An admin cross-references this against cienaCesAclGlobalRuleStatsPacketCount specifically to compute average packet size for traffic hitting a rule, which can itself be diagnostically useful. For example, a rule intended to catch small DNS query packets but showing a high byte count relative to its packet count would prompt an admin to double check the rule's match criteria aren't inadvertently also catching larger, unrelated traffic.