friendly name

What is a friendly name?

A friendly name is a term used to refer to a device, application file, certificate or other IT asset instead of its technical identifier.

Friendly names are used to complement unique identifiers (UIDs), which are numeric or alphanumeric strings assigned to entities by default. Unlike UIDs, friendly names can be changed.

Friendly names are designed to be easy for humans to remember and might provide some basic information about the asset's purpose. For example, if an IT administrator creates a new VMware virtual disk with the default UID Windows 8-f001.vmdk, the administrator might give it a friendly name such as FinanceLab4 to indicate that the virtual machine is the fourth server used in the finance department's development project.