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Use skills to add instructions or context to your Canvas investigations. Skills help Canvas remember important details about your applications, your team, or preferred ways of working. Create a new skill whenever you find yourself repeating the same steps in a Canvas investigation or want to share a multi-step investigation workflow with your team. Canvas skills follow the Agent Skills standard. Canvas only uses skills during relevant investigations or you can invoke skills
by typing /skill-name in the chat. You can access your team’s Canvas skills in two ways:
  • Navigate to Canvas > Skills and Knowledge
  • In a Canvas chat, select the plus (+) button then choose Skills > Manage Skills

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Creating skills

To create a new skill, navigate to Canvas > Skills and Knowledge and select New Skill.
1

Make a private skill or team skill

Use the Keep private toggle at the top to switch between creating a private/personal skill or a skill for your team.
2

Give your skill a name

  • 1-64 characters
  • Can only use lowercase alphanumeric characters (a-z, 0-9) and hyphens (-)
  • Cannot start or end with a hyphen (-)
3

Add a description

Describe what your skill does and when the Canvas agent should use it.You can include trigger phrases in your skill’s description to help Canvas better understand when to run your skill.
4

Add your instructions and context

Write instructions for the Canvas agent to follow when your skill activates.Skill content can be provided as plain text or Markdown.

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Editing and managing skills

You can access your team’s Canvas skills in two ways:
  • Navigate to Canvas > Skills and Knowledge
  • In a Canvas chat, select the plus (+) button then choose Skills > Manage Skills
From the Skills and Knowledge page you can:
  • Create a new skill by selecting New Skill.
  • Edit skills using the edit button.
  • Delete skills using the delete (trash can) button.

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Sharing skills with your team

To share personal skills with the rest of your team:
  1. Navigate to Canvas > Skills and Knowledge.
  2. Under Your Skills, find the skill you want to share.
  3. Select the skill actions button.
  4. Choose Share with team from the dropdown.
  5. Select Share with team to confirm.

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Enabling and disabling skills

To enable or disable a skill in your own investigations:
  1. Navigate to Canvas > Skills and Knowledge.
  2. Enable or disable skills using the toggle button for each skill.

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Enabling and disabling skills for your team

Team owners can enable or disable team skills and built-in skills for everyone on their team. To enable or disable a skill for your team:
  1. Navigate to Canvas > Skills and Knowledge.
  2. Find the team skill or built-in skill you want to enable/disable for your team.
  3. Select the skill actions button.
  4. Choose Disable for team/Enable for team from the dropdown.

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Built-in skills

Canvas includes the following skills by default. These skills cannot be removed or modified.
  • agent-instrumentation-audit: Check an AI agent’s telemetry coverage and flag instrumentation gaps.
  • conversation-investigation: Debug AI sessions, conversations, or AI workflows captured via OpenTelemetry GenAI semantic conventions using Honeycomb’s Agent Timeline.
  • metrics-queries: How to query metrics datasets in Honeycomb.
  • observability-fundamentals: Answers conceptual questions about observability and gives tool-agnostic guidance.
  • production-investigation: Debug production issues using the core analysis loop and Honeycomb features.
  • query-patterns: How to write effective Honeycomb queries.
  • slos-and-triggers: How to design SLOs, when to use SLOs or triggers, and how to interpret an SLO status.
  • summarize: Summarize a Canvas so you can quickly get up to speed.