Or simply have a naming convention for hosts. I realize that only makes sense for sufficiently large setups, but once your setup is large enough, it does make things easier.

At $work we maintain setups for customers, and our FQDNs are roughly <function><counter><environment>.<customer>.<ourdomain>.tld. So the second database server in the testing environment for customer "nasa" (hypothetical, of course) would be called db02t.nasa.<ourdomain>.<tld>.

It does make it pretty obvious from the FQDN what the used is being used for.