Domain separation and Surveys

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

    Domain separation in Surveys allows ServiceNow customers to logically separate data, processes, and administrative tasks into distinct domains. This separation controls user access and visibility of survey data based on domain membership, supporting multi-tenant use cases such as service providers managing tenant-specific surveys. The feature ensures that data and business logic operate correctly within the appropriate domain at runtime, including separation in the user interface, cache keys, reporting, rollups, and aggregations.

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    How Domain Separation Works in Surveys

    • Survey creators with the surveyadmin role can create surveys only in their assigned domain, while Global domain surveyadmins can create or edit surveys across any domain.
    • Survey takers can access and complete surveys in their domain and in the Global domain. Global domain users have access to surveys in all domains.
    • The platform provides default domains like Global, Acme, and Cisco when the Domain Support-Domain Extensions Installer plugin is activated (activation restricted to ServiceNow employees).

    Access and Assignment Rules

    • Users can only access survey records within their domain and the Global domain. For example, Acme domain users access Acme and Global surveys, but not Cisco.
    • Users can assign surveys to users within their own domain or to Global domain users; cross-domain assignments outside these rules are not allowed.
    • Global domain users can view surveys from any domain but cannot assign surveys across domains beyond their permissions.

    Trigger Conditions in Domain-Separated Instances

    • Global domain users can create trigger conditions for surveys in any domain and can trigger surveys by selecting users from other domains.
    • Survey assignments based on triggers must respect domain boundaries; users can assign triggers only within their domain or Global domain.
    • Trigger conditions without a domain path are visible to users from any domain, enabling cross-domain visibility in certain scenarios.

    Practical Implications for ServiceNow Customers

    Implementing domain separation in Surveys enables controlled multi-tenant survey management, ensuring that survey data privacy and access are maintained according to organizational boundaries. Customers acting as service providers can manage multiple tenants’ surveys securely, with clear rules for survey creation, access, assignment, and triggering, aligning with enterprise security and compliance requirements.

    Domain separation is supported in Surveys. 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: 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 Domain Separation

    As a survey creator, survey_admin can create surveys in the assigned domain. A Global domain survey_admin can create or edit survey in any domain.

    As a survey taker, a user can access the survey record and take the survey based on the domain of the survey record and user. Global domain users can take a survey in any domain.

    How domain separation works in Surveys

    There are several main areas to consider in how domain separation works in Surveys.

    Surveys in domain-separated instances

    The following domains are available by default after activating the Domain Support-Domain Extensions Installer [com.glide.domain.msp_extensions.installer] plugin. Only ServiceNow employees can activate this plugin.

    • Global
    • Acme
    • Cisco

    Access to surveys in domain-separated instances

    Based on the domain of the survey record and users, users can access the survey record and take the survey.

    Global domain users can access survey records in any domain. Users in any other domain can access records in their domain and Global domain. For example, users in the Acme domain can access records in the Acme domain and the Global domain.

    Global domain users can take a survey in any domain. Users in any other domain can take surveys in their domain as well as the Global domain. For example, users in Acme domain can take surveys in the Acme domain and the Global domain.

    Location of the survey record Users who can access and take the survey
    N/A Global Acme Cisco
    Global Yes Yes Yes
    Acme Yes Yes No
    Cisco Yes No Yes

    Any domain user can assign a survey in that domain to the same domain user or a Global domain user. For example, an Acme domain user can assign a survey to a Global domain user or an Acme domain user. Users from other domains are not visible to the Acme domain user.

    Although the Global domain user can view a survey from other domains, this user cannot assign the survey of one domain to a user from a different domain. For example, a Global domain user can assign a survey from the Acme domain to another Global domain user or an Acme domain user, but not to a Cisco domain user.

    Note:
    When a task is closed in a child domain and the assigned survey is either in the child domain or the global domain, the user from the child domain can then take the survey.

    Trigger conditions in domain-separated instances

    A Global domain user can create a triggered condition for a survey from any domain. The Global domain user can create an incident and trigger the survey by selecting a user from the other domain in the User field under Caller. However, the Global user cannot assign the survey to the user of different domain.

    A user can assign a trigger condition to a survey if the user belongs to the Global domain or the Survey domain.

    If there is no domain path for a trigger condition, users from any domain can view the trigger condition. For example, in the asmt_condition table that has no column for the domain path, users from the Acme domain can view the trigger condition created by the Cisco domain users.