Domain separation levels of support

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated January 30, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Domain separation levels of support

    Domain separation is a critical framework in ServiceNow that enables applications to distinguish data and configurations for multiple customers (tenants) within a shared instance. This ensures secure data segregation and tailored functionality according to each customer’s needs. Choosing the appropriate domain separation level depends on your application’s business use cases, the personas involved, and the degree of data and process isolation required.

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    Domain Separation Levels

    ServiceNow categorizes domain separation support into three incremental levels, reflecting increasing complexity and customer control:

    • No support: The domain field may exist on tables, but no business logic manages domain data. This is not considered true domain separation.
    • Basic (Customer data management): Business logic ensures data is correctly routed to appropriate domains during runtime in UI, reporting, caching, and aggregations. Instance owners configure the application to operate across multiple tenants. This level supports scenarios like a service provider responding to a customer chat message visible only to that customer.
    • Standard (Customer process management): Includes Basic level features plus the ability for service providers to create or modify processes per customer. Instance owners can configure minimum viable product business logic and data parameters per tenant. For example, enforcing mandatory comments on record closure for one customer but not another.
    • Enhanced (Customer self-managed configuration): Builds on Basic and Standard by enabling customers themselves to safely configure business logic and data parameters through UI-based settings. These configurations are isolated to prevent cross-customer impact. An example use case is allowing customers in a shared environment to adjust priority or impact settings within their domain.

    Additionally, some platform features or applications may support service provider use cases effectively without leveraging the domain separation framework fully. These are marked with an asterisk () and are based on detailed use cases, such as pre-New York release Service Catalog configurations that allowed tenant-specific catalogs via user criteria.

    Practical Considerations for ServiceNow Customers

    • Evaluate your application’s business scenarios and customer personas to select the appropriate domain separation level.
    • Understand that higher levels of domain separation provide greater tenant autonomy and data/process isolation, but require more setup and management.
    • Use domain separation frameworks to enable secure, scalable multi-tenant applications that meet service provider and customer needs.
    • Leverage related concepts and tools such as domain hierarchies, domain picker, domain logs, and domain path query methods to optimize and troubleshoot domain-separated applications.

    Key Outcomes

    • Ensures secure segregation of tenant data and processes within a shared ServiceNow instance.
    • Enables tailored application behavior and configuration per customer or tenant.
    • Supports scalable multi-tenant service provider use cases with varying degrees of customer control.
    • Improves manageability and flexibility of ServiceNow applications deployed in domain-separated environments.

    Choose from three categories for domain separation of an application for your customers' organizations.

    Applications that support domain separation may support the separation of data and data routing only, have advanced business logic separation, or support tenant (customer) level administration of the application. These definitions delineate the support levels from the perspective of actual use cases and the people who implement them.

    Incremental ServiceNow support levels

    Domain separation support levels

    Level Type Summary
    No support
    • The domain field may exist on data tables, but no business logic exists to manage the data.
    • This level isn’t considered domain-separated.
    Basic Customer data management
    • Business logic: Ensures that data goes into the proper domain for the application’s service provider use cases.
    • In the application, user interface, cache keys, reporting, rollups, aggregations, and so on, all consider the properties of the domain at run time.
    • Your instance owners must be able to set up the application to function normally across multiple tenants.

    Use case: When a service provider uses chat to respond to a customer’s message, the client must be able to see the response.
    Standard Customer process management
    • Includes the Basic level
    • Business logic: Processes can be created or modified per customer by the service provider. The use cases reflect how the application is used by multiple service provider customers in a single instance.
    • Your instance owners must be able to configure minimum viable product (MVP) business logic and data parameters per customer for the specific application.

    Use case: Admin must be able to make comments required when a record closes for one customer, but not for another customer.
    Enhanced Customer self-managed configuration
    • Includes Basic and Standard levels
    • Enables service provider customers to modify business logic that is based on defined use cases. These configurations are UI-based and fail-safe so that configurations by one customer can’t affect another customer.
    • The instance customers must be able to configure MVP business logic and data parameters themselves.

    Use case: Customer of a shared environment must be able to make changes according to impact, urgency, or priority within a domain.
    Effective domain*

    In some cases, a platform feature or application may support service provider use cases even if the domain framework isn’t being used. The use cases must be detailed to support domain separation. An asterisk (*) after the support level indicates this kind of configuration.

    Use case: Before the New York release, Service Catalog had no domain support but the instance owners could configure separate catalogs and items for each tenant in a domain-separated instance by using user criteria. The result was that each tenant could use Service Catalog at a Standard level.

    To view all applications listed by their support level see Application support for domain separation.

    Summary

    Domain separation is a framework that you must use to make your applications aware of its customers.

    Consider the domain framework capabilities, your applications' business use cases, what the personas are, and how they use the application before you can use the framework to make your application supportable.