Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) is primarily used to obtain protocol addresses of neighboring devices and discover the platform of those devices. CDP can also be used to show information about the interfaces your router uses. CDP is media- and protocol independent, and runs on all Cisco-manufactured equipment including routers, bridges, access servers, and switches.
Use of SNMP with the CDP Management Information Base (MIB) allows network management applications to learn the device type and the SNMP agent address of neighboring devices, and to send
SNMP queries to those devices. Cisco Discovery Protocol uses the CISCO-CDP-MIB.
CDP runs on all media that support Subnetwork Access Protocol (SNAP), including local-area network (LAN), Frame Relay, and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) physical media. CDP runs over the data link layer only. Therefore, two systems that support different network-layer protocols can learn about each other.
Each device configured for CDP sends periodic messages, known as advertisements, to a multicast address. Each device advertises at least one address at which it can receive SNMP messages. The
advertisements also contain time-to-live, or holdtime, information, which indicates the length of time a receiving device should hold CDP information before discarding it. Each device also listens to the
periodic CDP messages sent by others in order to learn about neighboring devices and determine when their interfaces to the media go up or down.
CDP Version-2 (CDPv2) is the most recent release of the protocol and provides more intelligent device tracking features. These features include a reporting mechanism which allows for more rapid error tracking, thereby reducing costly downtime. Reported error messages can be sent to the console or to a logging server, and cover instances of unmatching native VLAN IDs (IEEE 802.1Q) on connecting ports,and unmatching port duplex states between connecting devices. See the Cisco IOS Software System
Error Messages document for detailed examples of CDP error messages.
CDPv2 show commands can provide detailed output on VLAN Trunking Protocol (VTP) management domain and duplex modes of neighbor devices, CDP-related counters, and VLAN IDs of connecting ports
VLAN Trunking Protocol (VTP) is a discovery technique deployed by switches where each switch advertises its management domain on its trunk ports, its configuration revision number, and its known VLANs and their specific parameters. A VTP domain is made up of one or more interconnected devices that share the same VTP domain name. A switch can be configured to be in only one VTP domain.
The command used for enabling cdp globally is
# cdp run - to enable cdp globally
# cdp enable - to enable cdp on a particular interface
# clear cdp table - to delete the cdp table information about
neighbours
# show cdp - Displays the interval between transmissions of
CDP advertisements,the number of seconds
the CDP advertisement is valid for a given
port, and the version of the advertisement.
