This object indicates whether the device supports the Service Level statistics feature at all, letting management software determine whether it's worth attempting to read the rest of this statistics table. Administrators or polling software check this first before relying on the more detailed service-level counters elsewhere in the MIB. For example, a device reporting notSupported(1) here would tell a monitoring system not to bother polling the per-port service-level octet counters, since the feature isn't available.