Domain separation and Stream Connect

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated July 31, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Domain separation and Stream Connect

    Domain separation in Stream Connect allows ServiceNow customers to logically segment data, processes, and administrative tasks into distinct domains. This segmentation ensures that users only see and access data relevant to their domain, enhancing security and operational clarity across multiple tenants within a single ServiceNow instance. Stream Connect fully supports domain separation, enabling multi-tenant usage and domain-aware application properties and business logic.

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    Key Features

    • Message Replication Domain Separation: Key Stream Connect message replication tables are domain separated, including message, channel, statistics, and Kafka topic replication tables. Domains for these records are assigned based on specific fields and references to maintain domain consistency.
    • Topic Namespaces: Kafka topics are linked to namespaces, which are assigned to ServiceNow domains. This linkage controls domain-based access, allowing users to interact only with Kafka topics visible within their domain according to access control rules.
    • Producers and Consumers: Stream Connect producers can only send data to Kafka topics visible within their domain. Consumer runtime data tables are domain separated, ensuring that Kafka streams, subscriptions, and partition groups operate within the correct domain context and data is imported appropriately.
    • Schema Management: Tables managing schemas and schema registries in Stream Connect are domain separated, supporting isolated schema configurations per domain.

    Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    • Enables secure, multi-tenant Stream Connect deployments by segregating data and processes per customer or business unit.
    • Allows administrators to tailor configurations, such as mandatory comments or business logic, on a per-domain basis to meet specific tenant requirements.
    • Ensures Kafka topic visibility and data streaming operations respect domain boundaries, preventing unauthorized data access.
    • Simplifies management of schemas and replication processes with domain-aware tables, supporting scalable and compliant data integrations.

    Domain separation is supported for Stream Connect. 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.

    Message replication

    Records in the following Stream Connect Message Replication tables are domain separated.
    • Message Replications [sys_sc_message_replication]
    • Channel Replications [sys_sc_channel_replication]
    • Message Replication Statistics [sys_sc_channel_replication_metric]
    • Kafka Topic Replications [sys_kafka_topic_replication]

    The domain for a message replication record is specified in the record's sys_domain field.

    For channel replication and replication metrics records, the domain is determined by the domain_master attribute. The domain_master attribute uses a reference field's domain to determine the domain for the current record. A channel replication record gets its domain from the referenced message replication record. A replication metrics record gets its domain from the referenced channel replication record.

    A Kafka topic replication record has the same domain as its associated channel replication record because the Channel Replications table is a parent of the Kafka Topic Replications table.

    Topic namespaces

    You can use topic namespaces to configure which domains can access a Kafka topic on a domain-separated instance. In ServiceNow, Kafka topics are linked to a namespace. Namespaces can be linked to ServiceNow domains. When a namespace is assigned to a specific domain, all the topics created with that namespace are also assigned to the namespace's domain. Users can only see and interact with the topics they have access to, based on domain visibility and access control lists (ACLs).

    For more information, see Managing namespaces and topics in Hermes.

    Producers and consumers

    Stream Connect producers and consumers are also domain separated. For producers, you can produce data only to topics that are visible to the domain.

    For consumers, all the tables used to keep runtime data are domain separated. These tables include the following.
    • Kafka Streams [sys_kafka_stream]
    • Kafka Subscriptions [sys_kafka_subscription]
    • Kafka Subscription Partition Groups [sys_kafka_partition_group]
    • Kafka Consumer Statistics [sys_kafka_consumer_statistics]
    • Kafka Unprocessed Messages [sys_kafka_unprocessed_messages]

    Domain users can create domain-specific Kafka streams with the topics that are visible to the domain. When activating a Kafka stream, the subscription and partition groups are created within the same domain. At runtime, the domain of the partition group is set by the consumer thread so that all the data is imported to the correct domain. For more information on producers, consumers, and Kafka streams, see Using Stream Connect for Apache Kafka.

    Schema management

    Tables for schemas and schema registries are domain separated. These include the following.
    • Stream Connect Schemas [stream_connect_schema]
    • Standalone Stream Connect Schema [standalone_stream_connect_schema]
    • Confluent Stream Connect Schema [confluent_stream_connect_schema]
    • Stream Connect Schema Registry [stream_connect_schema_registry]
    • Confluent Stream Connect Schema [confluent_stream_connect_schema]
    • Standalone Stream Connect Schema [standalone_stream_connect_schema]