CISCO DISCOVERY PROTOCOL (CDP)

Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) is a powerful network monitoring and troubleshooting tool. CDP is an information-gathering tool used by network administrators to get information about directly connected Cisco devices. CDP is a proprietary tool that enables you to access a summary of protocol and address information about Cisco devices that are directly connected. By default, each Cisco device sends periodic messages, which are known as CDP advertisements, to directly connected Cisco devices. Layer 3 Neighbors At this point in our topology configuration, we only have directly connected neighbors. At Layer 3, routing protocols consider neighbors to be devices that share the same network address space. Layer 2 Neighbors CDP operates at Layer 2 only. Therefore, CDP neighbors are Cisco devices that are directly connected physically and share the same data link.

show cdp neighbors and show cdp neighbors detail commands

CDP runs at the Data Link layer connecting the physical media to the upper-layer protocols (ULPs). Because CDP operates at the Data Link layer, two or more Cisco network devices, such as routers that support different Network layer protocols (for example, IP and Novell IPX), can learn about each other. When a Cisco device boots up, CDP starts up by default. CDP automatically discovers neighboring Cisco devices running CDP, regardless of which protocol or suites are running. CDP exchanges hardware and software device information with its directly connected CDP neighbors.

CDP provides the following information about each CDP neighbor device:
Device identifiers - For example, the configured host name of a switch Address list - Up to one Network layer address for each protocol supported Port identifier - The name of the local and remote port-in the form of an ASCII character string such as ethernet0 Capabilities list - For example, whether this device is a router or a switch Platform - The hardware platform of the device; for example, a Cisco 7200 series router

CDP show commands

The information gathered by the CDP protocol can be examined with the show cdp neighbors command. For each CDP neighbor, the following information is displayed: Neighbor device ID Local interface Holdtime value, in seconds Neighbor device capability code Neighbor hardware platform Neighbor remote port ID

If you need to disable CDP globally, for the entire device, use this command: Router(config)#no cdp run If you want to use CDP but need to stop CDP advertisements on a particular interface, use this command: Router(config-if)#no cdp enable