Domain separation and Surveys

  • Release version: Xanadu
  • Updated August 1, 2024
  • 3 minutes to read
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    Summary of Domain separation and Surveys

    Domain separation in Surveys allows ServiceNow customers to logically separate data, processes, and administrative tasks into distinct domains. This separation controls access and visibility, ensuring that users only interact with data appropriate to their domain. Survey creators (surveyadmin) can create and manage surveys within their assigned domains, while global domain users have broader access across all domains. Survey takers can participate in surveys based on their domain affiliation, with global users able to take surveys in any domain.

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    Key Features

    • Multi-tenant support: Designed for instances serving multiple tenants, with domain separation enforced at runtime.
    • Data and process isolation: Includes separation in user interface, cache keys, reporting, rollups, and aggregations to maintain domain boundaries.
    • Domain-specific survey creation and access: Survey admins create surveys within their domains; global admins can create or edit surveys across all domains.
    • Access control: Users can only access and take surveys within their domain or the global domain. Global users have cross-domain survey access.
    • Survey assignment rules: Domain users can assign surveys only to users within their own domain or the global domain, maintaining strict domain boundaries for assignments.
    • Trigger conditions: Global domain users can create trigger conditions for surveys across domains, but assignment of triggered surveys respects domain boundaries.

    Practical Implications for ServiceNow Customers

    • Ensure your instance owner configures domain separation properly to support multi-tenant survey use cases.
    • Survey data and interactions remain secure and segregated by domain, which is essential for service providers managing multiple customers.
    • Global domain users serve as administrators with broad visibility and control, while domain-specific users operate within their own domain context.
    • Survey assignments and triggered surveys must respect domain boundaries to prevent unauthorized access or data exposure.
    • This capability supports scenarios like service providers responding to tenant customers via surveys without cross-domain data leakage.

    Domain separation is supported in Surveys. Domain separation enables you to separate data, processes, and administrative tasks into logical groupings called domains. You can control several aspects of this separation, including which users can see and access data.

    Support level: Basic

    • Business logic: Ensure that data goes into the proper domain for the application’s service provider use cases.
    • The application supports domain separation at run time. The domain separation includes separation from the user interface, cache keys, reporting, rollups, and aggregations.
    • The owner of the instance must set up the application to function across multiple tenants.

    Sample use case: When a service provider (SP) uses chat to respond to a tenant-customer’s message, the customer must be able to see the SP's response.

    For more information on support levels, see Application support for domain separation.

    Overview of domain separation and surveys

    As a survey creator, survey_admin can create surveys in the assigned domain. A Global domain survey_admin can create or edit survey in any domain.

    As a survey taker, a user can access the survey record and take the survey based on the domain of the survey record and user. Global domain users can take a survey in any domain.

    How domain separation works in Surveys

    There are several main areas to consider in how domain separation works in Surveys.

    Surveys in domain-separated instances

    The following domains are available by default after activating the Domain Support-Domain Extensions Installer [com.glide.domain.msp_extensions.installer] plugin. Only ServiceNow employees can activate this plugin.

    • Global
    • Acme
    • Cisco

    Access to surveys in domain-separated instances

    Based on the domain of the survey record and users, users can access the survey record and take the survey.

    Global domain users can access survey records in any domain. Users in any other domain can access records in their domain and Global domain. For example, users in the Acme domain can access records in the Acme domain and the Global domain.

    Global domain users can take a survey in any domain. Users in any other domain can take surveys in their domain as well as the Global domain. For example, users in Acme domain can take surveys in the Acme domain and the Global domain.

    Location of the survey record Users who can access and take the survey
    N/A Global Acme Cisco
    Global Yes Yes Yes
    Acme Yes Yes No
    Cisco Yes No Yes

    Any domain user can assign a survey in that domain to the same domain user or a Global domain user. For example, an Acme domain user can assign a survey to a Global domain user or an Acme domain user. Users from other domains are not visible to the Acme domain user.

    Although the Global domain user can view a survey from other domains, this user cannot assign the survey of one domain to a user from a different domain. For example, a Global domain user can assign a survey from the Acme domain to another Global domain user or an Acme domain user, but not to a Cisco domain user.

    Note:
    When a task is closed in a child domain and the assigned survey is either in the child domain or the global domain, the user from the child domain can then take the survey.

    Trigger conditions in domain-separated instances

    A Global domain user can create a triggered condition for a survey from any domain. The Global domain user can create an incident and trigger the survey by selecting a user from the other domain in the User field under Caller. However, the Global user cannot assign the survey to the user of different domain.

    A user can assign a trigger condition to a survey if the user belongs to the Global domain or the Survey domain.

    If there is no domain path for a trigger condition, users from any domain can view the trigger condition. For example, in the asmt_condition table that has no column for the domain path, users from the Acme domain can view the trigger condition created by the Cisco domain users.