Domain separation and Notifications

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

    Domain separation in ServiceNow Notifications allows you to logically group and isolate data, processes, and administrative tasks into distinct domains. This capability enables control over user access and visibility of notifications based on domain context. Notifications support domain separation at the process level but not for the underlying email accounts, meaning notifications are triggered and managed per domain, but email sending and receiving are not domain-specific.

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    How Domain Separation Works in Notifications

    • Process Separation: Notifications are separated by domain in terms of processing, not data storage.
    • Notification Triggers: Notifications are triggered either when records are inserted or updated, or when specific events occur. Only notifications within the same domain or the global domain as the target record are processed.
    • Events Example: An event like [incident.inserted] triggers notifications configured in the domain of the incident record.

    Limitations with Email Accounts

    • Email accounts do not support domain separation because SMTP sending uses a single sender per account, making domain-specific configuration impossible.
    • Inbound emails are processed in the domain of the sender’s user account, not by domain-specific email accounts.
    • Performance note: Using more than 20 email accounts can slow email reception.

    Common Use Case and Solution

    If a domain-specific notification and a global notification are triggered by the same event, users may receive duplicate emails. To resolve this, set the [sysoverrides] field on the domain-specific notification to override the global notification settings and prevent duplicates.

    Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    • Enables tailored notification processes per domain, supporting multi-tenant environments.
    • Ensures notification rules respect domain boundaries while using shared email infrastructure.
    • Provides configuration options to avoid duplicate notifications and streamline administration.

    Additional Resources

    To further optimize notification management, customers can explore related features such as notification categories, email templates and layouts, email diagnostics, and delegated administration for domain-specific configurations.

    Domain separation is supported in the Notifications application. 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.

    Overview

    Domain separation is specifically supported in Notifications but not in email accounts. Notifications are not data-separated but they are process-separated. Notifications are also triggered by specific actions.

    Note:
    Subscription-based notifications are not domain aware and cannot support domain-specific settings.

    How domain separation works in Notifications

    There are two basic components of domain separation and Notifications.

    • Notifications are process-separated (not data-separated).
    • Notifications are triggered in two main ways:
      1. When a record is Inserted or Updated

        Notifications with matching conditions AND in the same domain and global domain as the inserted/updated record are processed.

      2. When an event defined in the notification is triggered
        1. Events typically have a target record. For example, [incident.inserted] event references the incident record being inserted.
        2. When an event is fired, notifications configured for that event in the same domain and global domain as the event’s target record are processed.

    Domains and email accounts

    Domain separation is not supported in email accounts for these reasons:

    1. Sending mail: There is only one SMTP sender per account. This prohibits providing domains for each account, and they are not configurable.
    2. For receiving Inbound mail: You can set up multiple email accounts but cannot meaningfully set the domain of an inbound email action. Inbound Actions are processed in the domain of the user who sent the email. For example: User_A in Domain A sends an email to a ServiceNow email account which executes the “Create an incident” inbound email action. The resulting new incident created by the inbound action is in Domain A.
    To learn more see Inbound email actions.
    Note:
    If the number of email accounts exceeds 20, reception of email slows down.

    Use case

    If an instance is using the Domain separation plugin and a new email notification is defined for a domain that has the same event as the notification on the global domain, the user receives two emails for the same event.

    Solution: Set the [sys_overrides] field on the notification that belongs to the domain so it overrides the setting on global. For more information, see Delegated administration.