As the ALIAS feature isn't working consistently across all pages and, in particular, email alerts, the means to replace the name of a monitored server is needed.

E.g., if someone, not a DBA or person familiar with SQL Monitor, set up each server as an I.P. address, or an equally meaningless Rackspace device ID, it is unreasonable to assume that I.P. or RS device translation to named server, which in our case is a customer name+nature combo, is held in every recipient's brain, or that we should carry around a pocket-sized hosts file printout...

If a simple operation such as swapping an I.P. for a friendly name were in place, it would obviate LOSING ALL HISTORIC DATA INCLUDING BASELINE INFORMATION for any such server. Loss happens simply because we must now ADD another server, configure all its exceptions to the default rules, kill all the "overdue" red-alerts, etc., etc., etc.. What a pain! Done it once, and do not look forward to 39 more...

It seems that the "server identifier" should be decoupled by design from any machine identifier, thus, it would appear that a Swap Server Name and Host-Reference feature ought to be a quick fix. Hope the underlying data model supports that...

This will save, literally, hours and hours of unnecessary reconfiguration and alert clearing effort per server.

As mentioned above, preservation of baseline and historic data is of paramount importance, especially given the redesigned overview page and interactive charts - if we lose our history, the charts are rendered useless for quite some time.