I find the interface discard counter a deceptively complex counter. When you ask people what the counter means the usual answer is that you are over running the throughput capability of an interface. Which matched pretty closely to the definition in the IF-MIB SNMP MIB.
The number of inbound packets which were chosen to be discarded even though no errors had been detected to prevent their being deliverable to a higher-layer protocol. One possible reason for discarding such a packet could be to free up buffer space.
ifInDiscards : https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1213.txt
The description from the MIB is often the cause of this counter incrementing, however as devices get more powerful and circuits keep increasing in size, this description is becoming less applicable. There are many other issues that have been lumped into this counter, all of these other issues are vendor, platform, and configuration dependent. Some examples I have found are,
- ASA Dispatch Unit CPU over utilization
- ASA ACL/ASP packet drops
- QoS on an IOS interface can cause an elevated (purposeful) number of frames dropped
- An ASIC shared between ports on a switch is being over utilized
- L2/L3 packet handling on some Linux kernels and some virtual network platforms
Looking at this list the interface discard counter starts to look more like a check engine light for a device or interface. As with the check engine light it is important to understand all of the that data your devices are presenting, and build good baselines of the statistics for your system. Ethan Banks has some good thoughts on data baselines in a post titled The Importance of Knowing Baselines.