The
Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) was developed by
Cisco Systems. It’s primarily used to obtain the protocol addresses of neighboring
devices and also to discover the
platform of those devices. It 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. CDP runs only over the data link layer enabling two systems that support different network-layer protocols to learn about each other. CDP Version-2 (CDPv2) is the most recent release of the
protocol and provides more intelligent device tracking features.