This counter tallies frames dropped on the ingress side of a port specifically because the DE (Discard Eligible) threshold was exceeded. It tells an administrator that the port's buffering for discard-eligible traffic is being overrun and low-priority frames are actively being sacrificed to protect higher-priority flows. For example, if this counter rises in step with a burst of DE-marked traffic seen elsewhere in the port's counters, the admin can confirm the discard policy is doing its job rather than dropping traffic indiscriminately.