Domain separation levels of support

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

    Domain separation in ServiceNow enables applications to distinguish and manage data and business logic across multiple customers or tenants within a shared environment. It is essential for service providers who need to support multiple organizations securely and independently on a single instance. The framework defines different levels of domain separation based on the degree of data and process isolation, as well as administrative control provided to tenants.

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    Domain Separation Support Levels

    ServiceNow categorizes domain separation support into three main levels, each progressively enabling more advanced separation and tenant autonomy:

    • No support: Data tables may include domain fields, but no business logic enforces domain separation. This level is not considered true domain-separated.
    • Basic (Customer data management): Ensures data routing and domain consideration across user interface, reporting, caching, and aggregations. Instance owners can configure the application to function properly for multiple tenants. Suitable for scenarios where data visibility must be limited per customer, such as chat responses visible only to the corresponding client.
    • Standard (Customer process management): Includes Basic features plus the ability to configure customer-specific business processes. Service providers can tailor minimum viable product (MVP) logic and data parameters per tenant. For example, enabling or disabling mandatory comments on record closure per customer.
    • Enhanced (Customer self-managed configuration): Builds on Standard by allowing tenants themselves to modify business logic through UI-based, fail-safe configurations that do not impact other customers. Tenants can adjust parameters like impact or priority within their domain, supporting greater self-service in shared environments.

    Additionally, some platform features or applications may support service provider use cases without implementing the full domain framework, indicated as an Effective domain level. For example, prior to certain releases, Service Catalog could be configured separately per tenant using user criteria, achieving domain separation outcomes without native domain framework support.

    Practical Implications for ServiceNow Customers

    • Choosing the appropriate domain separation level depends on your application’s business use cases, data sensitivity, and tenant autonomy requirements.
    • Basic separation addresses data isolation needs, Standard adds process customization per tenant, and Enhanced empowers tenants with self-service configuration capabilities.
    • Understanding these levels helps instance owners and application developers configure and build applications that securely support multiple customers while maintaining clear operational boundaries.
    • For existing applications without domain separation, consider if effective domain capabilities suffice or if upgrading to a higher support level is necessary to meet your service model.

    Additional Resources

    The domain separation framework integrates with many ServiceNow features and requires attention to domain hierarchies, query methods, and performance considerations. Exploring related topics such as managing domain properties, configuring separation with domain pickers, and understanding domain logs is recommended to optimize your multi-tenant environment.

    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.