This field is a bitmask indicating which of the configured alarm thresholds, if any, this live stats object's monitored values have currently crossed. On this Ethernet loss stats object it lets UCS Manager (and anything polling this OID) tell at a glance whether a specific counter breached its configured minor/major/critical threshold without having to compare every raw counter against its policy separately. For example, a nonzero value here would correspond to one of the counters in this same table — such as an error or drop count — having exceeded the threshold policy an administrator configured for this interface.