This counter reports the total bytes of ingress traffic on this PM instance that exceeded even the excess rate and were outright discarded, during the current, still-filling 15-minute window. Any nonzero value accumulated over the still-accumulating current interval represents traffic this specific service actually lost at ingress due to rate policing, which is a direct, quantifiable cause for a customer's throughput or application-quality complaint on this port, distinct from congestion elsewhere in the network. For example, if this counter shows 50,000 dropped bytes within the still-accumulating current interval right when a customer reports a large file transfer stalling, that strongly suggests their traffic burst past the service's excess rate rather than the file server itself being at fault.