This read-only gauge gives the hop count to the destination, where 0 means a direct connection, values between 1 and 15 indicate an indirect connection through that many intermediate units, and 16 means the destination is unreachable. An administrator reads it to understand how many units traffic must cross to reach a given destination and to detect routes that have gone unreachable. For example, seeing statPvcrRouteMetric jump to 16 for a previously reachable destination would immediately tell the administrator that destination has dropped out of the routing table's reach.