Domain separation and Performance Analytics

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated January 30, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Domain separation and Performance Analytics

    Domain separation in Performance Analytics allows ServiceNow customers to logically separate data, processes, and administrative tasks into distinct domains. This separation controls user access and visibility of data across multiple domains, enabling tailored administration and data collection within each domain. It supports multi-domain score collection and offers extended configuration for complex domain structures, particularly useful for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and customers with intricate domain hierarchies.

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    Key Features

    • Support Levels: Enhanced support includes all basic and standard features, allowing tenant-customers to independently configure essential business logic and parameters such as impact, urgency, and priority matrices within their domains.
    • Approaches to Domain Separation:
      • Global: Performance Analytics records are global; data collection respects domain boundaries, with users seeing only permitted domain data. This is the most common and recommended approach.
      • Domain-specific: Records themselves are domain-separated, with domain-level administration.
      • Hybrid: Low-level records are global, while high-level records are domain-separated, allowing split responsibilities between global and domain-level admins.
    • Extended Functionality for Complex Domains: Available through the Performance Analytics — Domain Separation Support plugin, this includes:
      • Hierarchical multi-domain configurations to group domains and control score collection and roll-ups.
      • Aggregate scoring by combining multiple domain scores.
      • Dashboard filtering by domain or domain aggregates.
    • PADomainUtils API: Facilitates copying Performance Analytics records between domains within the same instance.

    Requirements and Considerations

    • A fully enabled, subscription-based Performance Analytics with the Domain Support — Domain Extension Installer plugin activated.
    • Performance degradation may occur in instances with many domains, common in MSP scenarios; a knowledge base article (KB1516963) offers potential solutions.
    • Access to Now Support is necessary for assistance.
    • The extended domain separation features support only the global approach to domain separation.

    Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    By implementing domain separation in Performance Analytics, customers can:

    • Maintain clear data boundaries and control user access according to domain visibility.
    • Enable tenant-specific configuration of business logic without affecting other tenants, supporting multi-tenant environments.
    • Manage complex domain hierarchies efficiently with reusable domain configurations and aggregated analytics.
    • Customize dashboards and reports to reflect domain-specific or aggregated data views.

    Domain separation is supported for Performance Analytics. 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. Performance Analytics supports collecting scores from multiple domains and can be configured to enable domain-specific administration. Extended domain configuration functionality is available for customers with complex domains.

    Support level: Enhanced

    • Includes all aspects of Basic and Standard levels of support.
    • Data-driven process 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 cannot affect another.
    • Tenants of the instance must be able to configure minimum viable product (MVP) business logic and data parameters for themselves. This logic and parameters would be expected for the application's normal function.

    Sample use case: Tenant-customers of a shared environment must be able to modify the impact, urgency, or priority matrix to set priority within their domain.

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

    Requirements

    Warning:
    Instances with a large number of domains, as is typical for multiple service providers (MSPs), can experience performance degradation when retrieving Performance Analytics scores. For a potential solution, see KB1516963. Access to Now Support is required.

    Approaches to domain separation

    There are three approaches to domain separation in Performance Analytics:
    Global
    The Performance Analytics records, such as indicators and breakdowns, are all in the global domain. Data collection jobs respect the domains of facts table records, such as incidents, when they collect indicator scores. Users see scores only from domains they have visibility into. Platform Analytics Solutions use this approach. It is the most suitable approach in most cases.
    Domain-specific
    The Performance Analytics records themselves are domain-separated. Each domain has users with pa_admin and other roles for managing Performance Analytics.
    Hybrid
    Low-level Performance Analytics records, such as indicator sources, are global. High-level Performance Analytics records, such as widgets, are domain-separated. The pa_admin users manage the low-level, global records. Each domain has users with roles like pa_power_user to manage high-level records. This approach is advanced.
    For more information, see:

    Extended functionality for complex domains

    You can extend the domain separation support for Performance Analytics with the following features, designed especially for customers with complex domains to manage:

    Hierarchical multi-domain configurations
    Group domains together, based on their visibility to a user group or on other conditions. Collect scores on some, all, or none of the child domains of these domains. Decide whether to roll up child domain scores to the parent domain, and whether for all children or only those explicitly in the configuration.
    Collect aggregate scores
    Combine scores from the multiple domains in a domain configuration to create an aggregate score.
    Dashboard filtering by domain
    Filter dashboards to show scores by domain or domain aggregate, as you would by breakdown.

    The extended functionality is available in the Performance Analytics — Domain Separation Support plugin. The general requirements for domain separation in Performance Analytics also apply.

    Extended functionality supports only the global approach to domain separation.

    For more information about this extended functionality, see: Grouping domains in Performance Analytics domain configurations