Canva Incident Runbook

Overview

Rapid incident response for Canva Connect API integration failures. Covers triage, mitigation, escalation, and postmortem.

Prerequisites

• A named incident owner, access to redacted application telemetry, and an approved communication/escalation path.
• A paused or bounded mutation/export queue and a known rollback configuration.

Instructions

1. Stop affected writes/exports, capture only redacted status and opaque request identifiers, and classify authorization, provider, webhook, or application failure.
2. Check approved health/status signals without placing tokens, design IDs, URLs, or content in tickets or shell history.
3. Apply the least-invasive supported mitigation, reconcile pending operations, and obtain owner approval before resuming the queue.
4. Record the incident timeline, scope, rollback/recovery result, and preventive action in the protected incident record.

Quick Triage (First 5 Minutes)

#!/bin/bash
# canva-triage.sh — Run immediately when incident detected

echo "=== Canva Triage ==="

# 1. Is it Canva or us?
echo -n "Canva API: "
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "HTTP %{http_code} (%{time_total}s)\n" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CANVA_ACCESS_TOKEN" \
  "https://api.canva.com/rest/v1/users/me"

# 2. Check our health endpoint
echo -n "Our health: "
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "HTTP %{http_code}\n" \
  "https://api.ourapp.com/health"

# 3. Error rate (if Prometheus available)
echo "Error rate (5min):"
curl -s "localhost:9090/api/v1/query?query=rate(canva_api_errors_total[5m])" \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json; d=json.load(sys.stdin); print(d['data']['result'])" 2>/dev/null \
  || echo "Prometheus not available"

# 4. Rate limit status
echo -n "Rate limit remaining: "
curl -sD - -o /dev/null -H "Authorization: Bearer $CANVA_ACCESS_TOKEN" \
  "https://api.canva.com/rest/v1/designs?limit=1" 2>&1 \
  | grep -i "x-ratelimit-remaining" || echo "unknown"

Decision Tree

API returning errors?
├── YES → What HTTP status?
│   ├── 401 → Token expired → Refresh token, check rotation
│   ├── 403 → Scope issue → Verify integration permissions
│   ├── 429 → Rate limited → Enable backoff, check Retry-After
│   ├── 5xx → Canva outage → Enable fallback, monitor status page
│   └── Other → Check request format against API docs
└── NO → Is our integration healthy?
    ├── YES → Likely resolved or intermittent → Monitor
    └── NO → Check our infra (pods, memory, DNS, TLS)

Severity Levels

Immediate Mitigation by Error Type

401 — Token Expired / Revoked

# Check if token is valid
curl -s -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
  https://api.canva.com/rest/v1/users/me | python3 -m json.tool

# If expired: refresh all affected users' tokens
# If revoked: users must re-authorize via OAuth flow

429 — Rate Limited

# Check how long to wait
curl -sD - -o /dev/null -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
  "https://api.canva.com/rest/v1/designs" 2>&1 \
  | grep -i "retry-after"

# Immediate: reduce request rate
# Enable queue-based rate limiting

5xx — Canva Service Error

# Check Canva status page (no official status.canva.com for API)
# Check Canva developer community for reported outages

# Enable graceful degradation
# Return cached data where possible
# Show "Design features temporarily unavailable" to users

Communication Templates

Internal (Slack)

P[1-4] INCIDENT: Canva Integration
Status: INVESTIGATING | MITIGATING | RESOLVED
Impact: [Describe user impact]
API Response: HTTP [status code]
Current action: [What you're doing]
Next update: [Time]
IC: @[name]

External (Status Page)

Canva Design Features — Degraded Performance

We are experiencing issues with our design integration.
Users may see delays or errors when creating/exporting designs.

We are actively working with our design platform provider to resolve this.

Last updated: [ISO 8601 timestamp]

Post-Incident

Evidence Collection

# Collect logs for the incident window
kubectl logs -l app=canva-integration --since=2h > incident-canva-logs.txt

# Export metrics
curl "localhost:9090/api/v1/query_range?query=canva_api_errors_total&start=$(date -d '2 hours ago' +%s)&end=$(date +%s)&step=60" > metrics.json

Postmortem Template

## Incident: Canva API [Error Type]
**Date:** YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM UTC
**Duration:** X hours Y minutes
**Severity:** P[1-4]

### Summary
[1-2 sentence description]

### Timeline (UTC)
- HH:MM — [First alert / error detected]
- HH:MM — [Investigation started]
- HH:MM — [Root cause identified]
- HH:MM — [Mitigation applied]
- HH:MM — [Confirmed resolved]

### Root Cause
[Was it Canva-side or our integration? Token issue? Rate limit? Code bug?]

### Impact
- Users affected: N
- Failed operations: N designs / N exports

### Action Items
- [ ] [Preventive measure] — Owner — Due date

Output

The runbook produces a redacted incident record with severity, scope label, failure category, affected operation count, mitigation, reconciliation state, and owner decision. It excludes OAuth secrets, design content, asset URLs, and user data.

Examples

For a spike in token-refresh failures, pause export creation, report only aggregate 401 counts and opaque request IDs, and route users through the approved reauthorization flow. Do not retry a revoked token, expose it while triaging, or treat a failed health query as permission to bypass scope checks.

Error Handling

Resources

• Canva API Reference
• Canva Changelog

Next Steps

For data handling, see canva-data-handling.