Will configuring a custom URL impact existing external links?

[DarinH]

We're planning to configure a custom URL for our instance, e.g. help.company.com. I'm trying to determine the impact to external resources that are currently using the default URL, company.service-now.com. Will existing inbound hyperlinks and API clients break, or can they continue to use the default URL in addition to the new custom URL?

[Ryan Duce · Accepted solution]

Old instance URLs will still work. A few things to bear in mind though:

• You will always have separate user sessions between the old URL and the custom URL since session cookies are associated to the URL in the client. A user using a mix of old (bookmarked?) and new (notification links?) URLs may get unexpected behaviour.
• Login flows need to be considered. For local login, a password manager may not populate the user's password as expected, and identity providers don't work if the URL is different to the service provider URL as defined in the identity provider configuration.

For a better customer experience, it may be better to redirect all users who attempt to navigate to instance_name.service-now.com to the new instance URL under certain conditions (perhaps with UI scripts), but this can be hard to set up and needs to account for all scenarios including legacy / new links, identity providers / local logins, breakglass scenarios and non-interactive sessions (API calls etc) so proceed with caution if you take that approach.

[Bruno]

If the custom URL is not marked as the instance default, everything will work normally.
Any reference to the instance name or instance URL will use the default (company.service-now.com), in notifications that contain links if you wish to use custom URL you will need to explicitly specify.

[DarinH]

Thanks. The plan is to make the custom URL the instance default, and standardize external references to that going forward. I was mainly wanting to know if the cutover had to account for all those references immediately or if we could resolve those incrementally, most importantly any inbound API calls.