Domain separation and Process Mining

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

    Process Mining in ServiceNow enables the generation of business process flows by monitoring audit trails and analyzing process effectiveness. This helps quickly identify inefficiencies and supports in-depth process improvement.

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    Domain separation is fully supported within Process Mining, allowing customers to logically segregate data, processes, and administrative tasks into distinct domains. This separation controls user access and visibility, ensuring data is isolated appropriately across multiple tenants or business units.

    How Domain Separation Works in Process Mining

    • Each Process Mining project is associated with a specific domain set during project creation, which is the current user's domain.
    • All entities related to a process model—such as activity definitions, breakdowns, data logs, filters, notes, and CIM initiatives—are created within the same domain as the project to maintain consistent separation.
    • Entities created in connection with a domain-separated project inherit the domain of that project.
    • Projects can be shared either within their domain or globally to users with access rights.
    • Scheduled Process Mining jobs operate strictly within their domain, meaning they can include only project definitions belonging to that domain.
    • Project definitions launched via Performance Analytics KPI are created in the domain of the current user.
    • New CIM initiatives created from the Process Mining workspace are assigned to the domain of the associated project.

    Practical Use Cases

    • A user in the ACME domain, its parent domain, or the global domain can view project definitions and scheduled jobs created in the ACME domain.
    • Scheduled jobs created in a specific domain can only include project definitions from that same domain, preserving data isolation.
    • Domain changes do not cascade to related entities; each domain assignment is explicit and fixed.
    • Supports service provider scenarios where tenants and service providers need controlled visibility into shared communications or data.

    Why This Matters to ServiceNow Customers

    By leveraging domain separation in Process Mining, customers can confidently manage multi-tenant environments or segmented business units, ensuring that data and process insights remain secure and accessible only to authorized users. This setup supports compliance, data privacy, and operational clarity across different organizational boundaries.

    Setting up domain separation properly enables accurate and secure process analysis, tailored to specific organizational needs, and supports complex service provider use cases effectively.

    Domain separation is supported in Process Mining. Domain separation enables you to separate data, processes, and administrative tasks into logical groupings called domains. You can then control several aspects of this separation, including which users can see and access data.

    Support level: Basic

    • Business logic: Ensure that data goes into the proper domain for the application’s service provider use cases.
    • The application supports domain separation at run time. The domain separation includes separation from the user interface, cache keys, reporting, rollups, and aggregations.
    • The owner of the instance must set up the application to function across multiple tenants.

    Sample use case: When a service provider (SP) uses chat to respond to a tenant-customer’s message, the customer must be able to see the SP's response.

    For more information on support levels, see Application support for domain separation.

    Overview of Process Mining

    Process Mining provides a way to​ generate business process flows from monitoring audit trails and analyzing effectiveness, so you can quickly discover inefficiencies in your processes. This allows in-depth analysis of business processes for improving outcomes.

    How domain separation works in Process Mining

    A project is configured to generate the process flow. All entities related to a process model definition, such as activity definitions, breakdown definitions, child table definitions, extract data logs, filter sets, notes, and CIM initiatives are created in the same domain as the process model definition.

    When you create a new project definition, you set up its domain in the current user’s domain. Since you place all related entities for a model definition so they reside in the same domain, when you then create a related entity for a domain separated project definition, the entity is assigned to the project definition’s domain.

    You can share a project with its own domain or with global domain users.

    A Process Mining scheduled Job can include project definitions within the corresponding job’s domain only.

    A project definition launched from Performance Analytics KPI is created in the current user’s domain.

    A new CIM initiative added from a Process Mining workspace is created in the project definition’s domain.

    Use cases

    1. Project definition created in the ACME domain: A user belonging to the ACME domain, its parent, or the global domain, can view the project definition.
    2. A Process Mining scheduled job created in the ACME domain: A user belonging to the ACME domain, its parent, or the global domain, can view the Process Mining scheduled job.
    3. A Process Mining scheduled job created in the ACME domain: A user can include only a project definition belonging to the ACME domain.
      Note:
      Cascade domain changes are not supported.