This read-only Counter64 counts queries discarded because the ingress port was down at the moment the query arrived. A nonzero count right after a known link flap is expected and benign, but a steady trickle on a port that monitoring shows as up points to a state-tracking mismatch worth investigating; 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 metro aggregation uplink carrying several video EVCs, a count of 1,931 over the 111 days since the counters were last cleared is the kind of number an admin would trend against the join/leave rate on the same port to judge whether it's normal channel-surfing or an anomaly worth a closer look.