Hierarchical congestion identification and control hardware supports multi-level congestion control at flow, tenant and virtual machine (VM) levels. Hardware implementation expedites response to congestion notifications and frees-up processor bandwidth. A hierarchy of transmit shapers in a transmit ring scheduler isolate rate adjustments for flows, tenants and VMs. The hierarchy of shapers provide a hierarchy of congestion control nodes to control flows and aggregate flows. Hardware quickly associates congested flows with shapers before or after receiving a congestion notification. The associations may be used by any flow control algorithm to selectively rate-control shapers to control flow rates. Shaper associations and configured states, scheduler configuration, congestion states, thresholds and other flow information may be stored and monitored to filter data flows that need attention and to raise alerts at flow, tenant and VM levels. Congestion control occurs fast and without packet modification, queue or ring switching or queue accumulation.