Engine Works
Under the hood of Alteryx: tips, tricks and how-tos.
First, it was Covid.
Then, the bird flu.
Now, it’s Monkeypox.
Since 2020, it seems like we see more and more outbreaks of serious diseases. Understanding where diseases are moving and how quickly they’re spreading can help your business plan and prepare - whether that means predicting changes to your supply chain, providing protective equipment to employees, adjusting your work-from-home policy, predicting medical costs, or providing medical education to your employees.
Luckily, you don’t need to hire an epidemiologist to identify trends in disease spread - Alteryx Auto Insights can do it for you with just a few simple clicks!
The trickiest part of creating a disease tracker is finding a good data source. Fortunately, there’s a fantastic monkeypox data source updated on the daily (well, Monday through Friday at least) available here.
Now that you have a data source, you have a couple of options - you can upload it directly to Auto Insights, or you can create an Alteryx Designer workflow and schedule it to run routinely on Alteryx Server. The workflow below automatically downloads the most recent data, performs simple cleaning, and upload it to Auto Insights – and it’s scheduled to run daily on Server automatically. This way, your data will always be fresh, even if you forget a day.
The Auto Insights uploader tool is quick and easy to configure. In the Configuration panel, select ‘Set up a Connection.’ The Connection Manager window will pop up, and you can select “Add Data Source” in the top right of the window. Just fill in the name you’d like for your data source and your Auto Insights server’s hostname, then press “Save.”
When you get back to the Connection Manager window, select your Connection Method, check the box for “Allow connection for SDK,” and select your API token. Then press “Link.” If you don’t have an API Token setup, check out this simple 6-step article for creating your own API token in Auto Insights.
Whichever route you use to get your data into Auto Insights, you’re just a few clicks away from a quick and easy report (called a “Mission” in Auto Insights). Let's see if we can build this in 10 minutes or less. In the top menu bar, click “Missions” and then click the top right blue button “Create Mission.”
In the pop-up box, give your mission a name, and press “Next.” Select your Monkeypox data from the Datasets list, and “Number of Id” from the counts, then press “Create mission.”
In just a few quick seconds, your Mission will be generated. Right off the bat, you’re already getting insights! Click on the white “Number of Id” rectangle to see your mission:
When the Mission opens, we see some great information - the number and percent increase in cases from June to July, a graph of the number of cases per month since January, and key factors which are correlated with the increase in case counts. We see that the number of cases is increasing dramatically in the United States, among people aged 20 - 69, in the city of Toronto, and in males.
Building the tracker was super easy so far - and we’ve still got plenty of time in our 10 minutes to do some personalization, so let’s do it! Press the “Edit” button in the top right-hand corner, and let’s go! The Monkeypox outbreak has changed dramatically from week to week, so let's first change the timescale. At the top, click on the first time period, and select “Last week.”
Now the time scale on the chart is in weeks, not months, and it will always update to show results from the previous week - that was so easy!
Got another couple of minutes? Let’s keep going! What if your business has facilities in different countries, states, or cities - check out how quick and easy it is to add a breakdown by region.
Create a copy of your current Mission page by clicking the (…) on the “Number of Id” button in the left-hand Mission Contents, and clicking duplicate. At the top of your mission page, select “Add Breakdown.” You can click “Country,” “City,” or “Location” to break down your data. Let’s use Alteryx as an example. We have offices around the globe, so let’s select Country as our Breakdown.
That creates a whole lot of dots - one for each country submitting Monkeypox data - so let's filter it down to only look at companies where Alteryx has offices. Choose “Add Filter,” and under “Country,” select United States, Canada, United Arab Emirates, England, Spain, Germany, France, Czech Republic, Singapore, Australia, and Japan.
Again, in just seconds, we were able to create a new Mission page that shows results by country.
Again, the insights which were automatically generated can help in strategic planning for your business. In addition to a visual graph, Auto Insights tells us which countries are seeing sharp increases in diagnosed Monkeypox cases and which countries are seeing sharp decreases.
That was so easy, and we still have time for one final change to make our Mission even more powerful. If your data is being scheduled to push to Auto Insights through a scheduled workflow, you can also schedule an email subscription to receive weekly updates direct to your inbox.
In the top right of your Mission, press the email icon that says “Subscribe,” and then select “Create a new subscription.” Fill out the simple form, and you (or your designee) will get weekly status updates on Monkeypox in the key regions that matter most to your company.
And with that, in under 10 minutes, you were able to create a Monkeypox tracker that provides key data and insights valuable to your organization, with weekly updates delivered directly to your inbox.
