Domain separation explained
With domain separation, you can segregate application data, UI, and business logic, such as rules or workflows, in a single customer instance. Separating these elements into logically defined domains supports specific hierarchies for all customers using your applications.
Domain basics
Domain separation, also known as ServiceNow multitenant platform architecture, adds considerable overhead to the management of an instance. If you use domain separation correctly though, it can improve efficiency, add greater security, and increase the performance of your customers' instances.
You can't separate some global standards and properties, such as system properties and table schema, per tenant.
Before you start separating domains, read the following guidelines.
What you can do with domain separation
- Data separation: Enables tenants of the domain to see only data that they have
permissions to see. Tenants can be granted access to other tenant data but can't query
tenant data that they don't have access to.
- When you update data records, they do not generate Update Set records.
- Users, including the customer accounts that are used for integrations, see only the data in the domains they have permission to access.
- Customers, agents, and fulfillers see data that pertains to the customers and organizations that they support.
- UI separation: Supports a tenant-specific experience for UI elements such as views,
lists, labels, and so on.
- You can override the browser-based user interface, including application menus, lists, forms, and dashboards. You can also customize them for a specific domain or set of domains while preserving your basic process logic.
- Service providers can alter the displayed branding and UI elements to meet individual customer needs.
- Business logic separation: Creates tenant-specific system policies such as email notifications, business rules, client scripts, UI policy, and UI actions.
- Hierarchical modeling: Nests your multiple tenants so that parent tenants can access child tenant resources. Business logic for parent tenants runs automatically for child tenants, which you can override at any level.
- Cross-tenant intelligence: Automatically handles data, metadata, business logic, and processing context for tenants with access to additional tenant data.
Domain separation at a glance
The following graphic shows the division of data, process, and UI separation. These concepts are discussed in depth in the Recommended Practices section.
Domain architecture
User records are assigned a domain value that represents the user’s home domain. Users have no access to data in parent domains, peer domains, or domains in other branches of the hierarchy.
See Contains queries and domain access for advanced options to grant additional domain visibility.
The following diagram shows how the architecture process flows down to the child domains.