Domain separation levels of support

  • Release version: Washingtondc
  • Updated February 1, 2024
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Domain Separation Levels of Support

    Domain separation in ServiceNow allows applications to effectively manage and segregate data for different customer organizations. There are three defined support levels that address various use cases and configuration capabilities for service providers.

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    Key Features

    • No Support: Domain fields exist on data tables without any business logic for management. This level is not considered domain-separated.
    • Basic: Ensures proper data routing for applications, enabling instance owners to manage data for multiple tenants. Use cases include ensuring client visibility in shared communications.
    • Standard: Extends Basic features by allowing service providers to create or modify processes per customer, enabling tailored configurations for multiple tenants.
    • Enhanced: Allows customers to self-manage configurations based on defined use cases, ensuring fail-safe UI-based changes that do not affect other customers.
    • Effective Domain: Some applications may support service provider use cases without using the domain framework, allowing for separate configurations before formal domain support was implemented.

    Key Outcomes

    Understanding the levels of domain separation helps customers choose the appropriate configuration for their applications, ensuring data is managed correctly across different organizations. This framework is crucial for making applications aware of their customers' needs and enables tailored service delivery based on specific business requirements.

    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.