This object identifies, by index into the supported-protocols table, which specific application or protocol a threshold rule is configured to monitor, but per the description it is entirely ignored if the companion cnpdThresholdConfigProtocolAny object is set to TRUE. This matters operationally because an admin troubleshooting why a threshold on this specific protocol did not fire, while a different one did, needs to first check whether ProtocolAny is silently overriding this setting. If an admin intends to alert specifically on excessive bittorrent traffic but ProtocolAny is left TRUE, this object's configured protocol index is effectively meaningless and any protocol breaching the threshold will trigger instead.