On switches that support it, the “traceroute mac” command provides an quick way to find connected, addressed ethernet devices.

Beats running “sh mac-add | inc 0a01” and “sh cdp neigh <int> det” over and over on a large collapsed-core switched network.

The addresses need to be on the same vlan and the output is most useful if the device ips are wired.

Here’s an example

Switch#traceroute mac ip 10.78.112.110 10.78.112.111
Translating IP to mac …..
10.78.112.110 => 10dd.b1c4.b02b
10.78.112.111 => 10dd.b1c6.4801

Source 10dd.b1c4.b02b found on Switch2
1 Switch2 (10.78.144.14) : Gi2/0/25 => Gi2/0/17
Destination 10dd.b1c6.4801 found on Switch2
Layer 2 trace completed