Domain separation levels of support

  • Release version: Australia
  • Updated July 31, 2025
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    Summary of Domain separation levels of support

    Domain separation in ServiceNow enables applications to support multiple customers (tenants) by segregating data and business logic within a shared instance. This framework helps you design applications that are aware of and securely isolate customer data and processes. Choosing the right level of domain separation depends on the application's complexity, business use cases, and administration needs.

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    Levels of Domain Separation Support

    • No support: The domain field may exist on tables, but no business logic enforces separation. This level is not considered true domain separation.
    • Basic (Customer data management): Ensures data is routed and managed per domain, affecting UI, reporting, caching, and aggregations. It supports multi-tenant operation by segregating data properly for service provider use cases. For example, customer chat responses are visible only to the intended tenant.
    • Standard (Customer process management): Includes Basic support and adds per-customer configurable business processes. Service providers can customize minimum viable business logic and data parameters per customer. For example, requiring different record closure comments for different customers.
    • Enhanced (Customer self-managed configuration): Builds on Basic and Standard levels by allowing customers themselves to safely configure business logic through UI-based tools without impacting other tenants. This enables customers in a shared environment to adjust processes like impact or priority management independently.
    • Effective domain: Some platform features or applications support multi-tenant use cases without fully leveraging the domain framework but still achieve domain separation through detailed configurations. For example, earlier Service Catalog versions used user criteria to isolate catalogs per tenant at a Standard level despite lacking domain support.

    Practical Considerations for ServiceNow Customers

    When implementing domain separation, evaluate your application’s business requirements, the personas involved, and how they interact with the application. This ensures you select and configure the appropriate domain separation level to meet customer isolation, process customization, and administration needs.

    The domain framework supports:

    • Data segregation with domain-aware tables and queries
    • Domain-specific business logic and UI behaviors
    • Configurable processes per tenant
    • Self-service configuration options for tenants

    Use domain separation to secure customer data, tailor business processes per tenant, and enable tenant-level administration in multi-tenant ServiceNow environments.

    Choose from three categories for domain separation of an application for your customers' organizations.

    Applications that support domain separation may support the separation of data and data routing only, have advanced business logic separation, or support tenant (customer) level administration of the application. These definitions delineate the support levels from the perspective of actual use cases and the people who implement them.

    Incremental ServiceNow support levels

    Domain separation support levels

    Level Type Summary
    No support
    • The domain field may exist on data tables, but no business logic exists to manage the data.
    • This level isn’t considered domain-separated.
    Basic Customer data management
    • Business logic: Ensures that data goes into the proper domain for the application’s service provider use cases.
    • In the application, user interface, cache keys, reporting, rollups, aggregations, and so on, all consider the properties of the domain at run time.
    • Your instance owners must be able to set up the application to function normally across multiple tenants.

    Use case: When a service provider uses chat to respond to a customer’s message, the client must be able to see the response.
    Standard Customer process management
    • Includes the Basic level
    • Business logic: Processes can be created or modified per customer by the service provider. The use cases reflect how the application is used by multiple service provider customers in a single instance.
    • Your instance owners must be able to configure minimum viable product (MVP) business logic and data parameters per customer for the specific application.

    Use case: Admin must be able to make comments required when a record closes for one customer, but not for another customer.
    Enhanced Customer self-managed configuration
    • Includes Basic and Standard levels
    • 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 can’t affect another customer.
    • The instance customers must be able to configure MVP business logic and data parameters themselves.

    Use case: Customer of a shared environment must be able to make changes according to impact, urgency, or priority within a domain.
    Effective domain*

    In some cases, a platform feature or application may support service provider use cases even if the domain framework isn’t being used. The use cases must be detailed to support domain separation. An asterisk (*) after the support level indicates this kind of configuration.

    Use case: Before the New York release, Service Catalog had no domain support but the instance owners could configure separate catalogs and items for each tenant in a domain-separated instance by using user criteria. The result was that each tenant could use Service Catalog at a Standard level.

    To view all applications listed by their support level see Application support for domain separation.

    Summary

    Domain separation is a framework that you must use to make your applications aware of its customers.

    Consider the domain framework capabilities, your applications' business use cases, what the personas are, and how they use the application before you can use the framework to make your application supportable.