Domain separation and Service Level Management
Summarize
Summary of Domain separation and Service Level Management
Service Level Management (SLM) in ServiceNow supports domain separation, enabling customers to logically partition data, processes, and administrative tasks into distinct domains. This separation controls user access to data and ensures SLA management is tenant-specific within multi-customer instances.
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Domain separation is designed for service providers managing multiple customers (tenants) in a single instance, allowing configuration of business logic and data parameters per tenant. Users see only the content within their authorized domain, maintaining security and data isolation.
How Domain Separation Works in Service Level Management
- SLA definitions and task SLAs include domain fields to enforce domain boundaries.
- Task SLAs are created exclusively within the domain of their associated task record.
- SLA definitions must reside in a tenant or global domain to generate task SLAs.
- Task SLAs inherit the domain of their task records, including the related workflows.
- SLA definitions can be overridden in sub-domains through delegated administration.
Key Tables Supporting Domain Separation
- SLA definition ([contractsla]): Stores SLA templates and rules, domain-aware to support tenant-specific configurations.
- Task SLA ([tasksla]): Tracks SLA instances attached to tasks, domain-specific to ensure tenant data isolation.
Practical Use Cases
- An Employee Self-Service (ESS) user creates an incident in their domain; an SLA is attached within the same domain, but the ESS user cannot view SLA records due to role restrictions.
- An ITIL user in a domain can create incidents and view associated SLA records, supporting operational transparency.
- SLA Administrators can override SLA definitions from parent domains when sub-domains require tailored SLAs, with alerts notifying of such overrides.
- Users operating in sub-domains can create tasks where SLAs reflect the sub-domain’s customized definitions.
Why This Matters
Domain separation in SLM enables service providers and multi-tenant customers to enforce strict data segregation and customized SLA management within shared instances. This safeguards sensitive information, supports tenant-specific SLA configurations, and ensures compliance with service commitments per customer.
Domain separation is supported in Service Level Management. 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: Standard
- Includes all aspects of Basic level support.
- Application properties are domain-aware as needed.
- Business logic: The service provider (SP) creates or modifies processes per customer. The use cases reflect proper use of the application by multiple SP customers in a single instance.
- The instance owner must configure the minimum viable product (MVP) business logic and data parameters per tenant as expected for the specific application.
Sample use case: An Admin must be able to make comments required when a record closes for one tenant, but not for another.
For more information on support levels, see Application support for domain separation.
Service Level Management overview
- Service Level Management helps customers monitor, measure, and report on agreed service level agreements (SLAs); SLA definitions encapsulate these agreements.
- Users can see only content in the domain to which they have access.
How domain separation works in Service Level Management
The intention of SLM is to provide customers with an expectation of service within a known timescale and the ability to monitor when service levels are not being met. To learn specific terms and definitions see Service Level Management concepts.
- SLA definitions and task SLAs have domain fields. However, task SLAs are created only in the domain of its attached task record.
- SLA definitions must be defined in a tenant domain (or global) in order for task SLAs to be created and attached to a given task (or extensions).
- Task SLAs attach to a task if an SLA definition exists in the task records domain or in an ancestor domain.
- Task SLAs always inherit the domain of its attached task record, which includes the workflow running on the task SLA record. If a task record ever flips, the task SLA also slips.
- If an SLA definition exists in an ancestor’s domain, the definition can be overridden in a sub-domain (delegated administration).
Service Level Management domain-separated tables
- SLA definition [contract_sla]
- Task SLA [task_sla]
Service Level Management use cases
- An ESS user in the ACME domain logs in and creates an incident, at which point an SLA is
attached. The SLA is created in the domain of the associated task record (incident), which is
the ACME domain. The ESS user is not able to read SLA records. These are restricted to the
following roles:
- Administrator
- ITIL
- SLA Administrator
- SLA Manager
- An ITIL user in the Acme domain logs in and creates an incident. The process above is the same except that the ITIL user can read the SLA record attached to the incident.
- If an SLA definition exists in the Acme domain and doesn’t meet the needs of an Acme sub-domain (Acme child) an SLA Administrator can remediate. SLA Administrators can navigate to the ACME SLA definition when their session domain is ACME child, make the relevant changes, and save them. The SLA Administrator is alerted that an override has been created.
- An ITIL user sets the session domain to Acme child and creates an incident. The task SLA is created using the SLA definition from Acme child.