This read-only Counter64 is the frame-level counterpart of the Forwarded-bytes counter — frames successfully sent out on this PM instance. A frame-count jump with flat byte growth usually means the average frame size collapsed — for example a burst of small control packets — which this pairing exposes even when total throughput looks unremarkable; because it is drawn from the lifetime bin, which keeps accumulating until an operator explicitly clears it, a sudden plateau on an otherwise busy instance is itself a signal — most likely that someone cleared the stats rather than that traffic actually stopped. On a 10 Gbps wholesale handoff port, this might read 4,370,000 frames over the 24 days since the counters were last cleared, which an admin would cross-check against the matching byte counter to see if average frame size looks normal for that service.