Domain separation and Advanced Work Assignment

  • Release version: Australia
  • Updated March 12, 2026
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    Summary of Domain separation and Advanced Work Assignment

    Domain separation in ServiceNow allows you to logically isolate data, processes, and administrative tasks into distinct domains. This separation controls user access and visibility to data, which is essential for environments like Managed Service Providers (MSPs) supporting multiple tenants within a single instance.

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    Advanced Work Assignment (AWA) leverages domain separation to automatically assign work items to qualified agents through domain-specific queues linked to service channels. This ensures proper routing and assignment of tasks within the relevant domain, maintaining data and operational boundaries.

    Key Features

    • Domain-aware application properties: Application settings adjust according to domain context as needed.
    • Business logic per tenant: The service provider configures business rules and data parameters specifically for each tenant to reflect proper multi-customer usage.
    • Domain-specific work item queues: Queues can be restricted to items from specific domains or domain hierarchies using routing conditions like exact domain matching or domain path prefixes.
    • Assignment group eligibility: Work items are assigned only to agents within domains that have access to the relevant tasks, preventing unauthorized visibility.
    • Automatic reassignment on access failure: If an agent cannot access a work item, AWA rejects the assignment and attempts to reassign it, avoiding unauthorized task handling.

    Key Outcomes

    • Ensures strict separation and controlled visibility of work items across multiple tenants in a single ServiceNow instance.
    • Supports MSPs in managing domain-specific workflows and agent assignments efficiently and securely.
    • Prevents work items from being assigned to agents without proper domain access, maintaining compliance and data integrity.
    • Highlights the importance of correctly configuring eligible assignment groups to avoid work items getting stuck in queues due to access issues.

    Domain separation is supported in the Advanced Work Assignment feature. 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.

    Advanced Work Assignment enables the automatic assignment of work items to qualified agents using work item queues defined for specific service channels. Managed Service Providers can create domain-specific queues by specifying a particular domain as a queue routing condition.

    How domain separation works in Advanced Work Assignment

    When an instance has a domain hierarchy where users and groups belong to different domains, you may need to restrict the visibility of work items to certain agents in a domain. You may also need to ensure that work items are routed to agents in the proper domain. AWA admins can configure service channels and associated work item queues to:
    Route work by domains
    To push work items to agents in domains where only certain tasks or interactions are visible to them, use a routing condition that routes those items to the appropriate queues. For example:
    • To restrict a queue to only items that match exactly to a particular domain X, specify this condition: [Domain] [is] [X]
    • To route all work items in domain X and its child domains to a queue, use the Domain Path field and specify a condition such as: [Domain Path] [starts with] [!!!/!!#/]
    Assign work to agents in the appropriate domain
    To assign work items to agents in the appropriate domain, ensure that the assignment groups specified in the queue Eligibility Assignment pools have agents that belong to the domains where they can see the work items routed to the queue.

    If a mismatch occurs, and agents in an eligible assignment group cannot see a work item in a queue, AWA may temporarily assign an item to an agent. However, before the item is moved to the agent's inbox, AWA automatically rejects the assignment with the reason No access. AWA reassigns the work item to a different agent who might have access. If none of the available agents can see the work item, the item could be rejected multiple times.

    Warning:
    The item can get stuck in the queue until the AWA admin corrects the eligible assignment configuration.