Incident response process

At times, partners may experience issues with an integration. Some issues may severely impact a partner's business. Canva refers to such issues as Incidents.

Canva has a streamlined process to address incidents. Partners must follow this process and report incidents immediately. This helps Canva resolve issues quickly and reduce the adverse impact on a partner's business.

This document explains Canva's incident response process.

Not all issues are incidents. Some issues may be bugs. Canva differentiates incidents from bugs in the following way:

Issue typeDescriptionSeverityAttention
IncidentSeverely impacts a partner's business. See Types.HighImmediate
BugAffects only a few users, designs, or artworks, and not the entire business.Medium, LowCan wait

Canva classifies incidents into the following types:

Incident< 0.05% Affected users0.05% - 1% Affected users1% - 10% Affected users> 10% Affected users
Core feature brokenMinorMajorMajorCritical
Non-core feature brokenMinorMinorMinorMajor
Performance severely affected (barely usable)MinorMinorMajorCritical
Performance slightly affected (degraded, but usable)MinorMinorMinorMajor

Canva has a team of engineers on call to respond to incidents and a dedicated team to specifically respond to partnership incidents.

Canva has tooling to monitor the health and performance of its system. Canva sets up these monitors to proactively alert Canva engineers of failures in the system.

Canva engineers get to know of a failure even before a partner gets to know.

Canva has a dashboard that shows the system's status in real time. The dashboard is available at https://www.canvastatus.com/.

If partners suspect something's wrong with an integration, they can check the status in the dashboard.

Partners can receive alerts when Canva creates, updates, or resolves an incident, or changes a component status.

To subscribe to alerts:

  1. Navigate to Canva's monitoring dashboard at https://www.canvastatus.com/.
  2. Click SUBSCRIBE TO UPDATES.
  3. Select the way you want to receive alerts:
    1. For webhook notifications, specify the endpoint URL.
    2. For email notifications, specify an email address.

To report an incident:

  1. Navigate to the Canva Helpdesk.
  2. Select Incident.
  3. Select Report an incident.
  4. Fill out the required fields.
  5. Attach screenshots and code snippets as needed.
  6. Click Send.

Canva engineers will respond via the ticket. The response time varies according to the incident type. Only if they deem necessary, will they contact a partner via other means, such as telephone or video call.

To report bugs:

  1. Navigate to the Canva Helpdesk.
  2. Select Support.
  3. Select Report a bug.
  4. Fill out the required fields.
  5. Attach screenshots and code snippets as needed.
  6. Click Send.

Canva engineers will respond via the ticket during their regular business hours.

Canva's response time varies according to the incident type:

ResponseCriticalMajorMinor
AcknowledgeWithin 15 minutesWithin 15 minutesWithin 8 hours
StartImmediatelyImmediatelyWithin 8 hours
UpdateEvery hourEvery hourAs per Canva's Bug Fix Policy
ResolveWithin 8 hoursWithin 24 hoursAs per Canva's Bug Fix Policy
InformImmediately after resolvingImmediately after resolvingImmediately after resolving
CloseWithin 15 minutes of informingWithin 15 minutes of informingWithin 15 minutes of informing

Canva takes the following actions after the incident:

  1. Starts the root cause analysis immediately. If notified outside of business hours, Canva starts the analysis the next business day.
  2. Prepares a Root Cause Analysis report (RCA report). The report has:
    1. Issue summary.
    2. Incident duration.
    3. Incident start timestamp and end timestamp.
    4. Number of affected customers.
  3. Sends the RCA report to the partner.