Working with monitoring survey data

Akvo's data platform guides you through all steps of your data journey, also when it comes to using the monitoring feature. You can find on Akvo Flow's support page articles focused on the Design and Capture stages. Akvo Lumen's support page guides you on how to Understand the data.

Connecting registration and monitoring data

To work with monitoring survey data you often need to connect the details about your data point to the monitoring data, or vice versa to see the latest status of each data point by brining in the latest monitored values to the basic data on your data points. You can best do this with Lumen's merging feature.

Handling time

When monitoring, you want to see how a value changes over time. With Flow data, time is represented by the submission date of each submission made to your data point. In Lumen the submission date is shown in the column 'Submitted at'. Depending on how often you monitor you may need to adjust the submission dates to show only months or years or days. In this article we explain how to best handle time to easily analyse and visualise your monitoring data.

Visualising change over time

Monitoring form datasets hold all the data submitted over time for all your data points. You can visualise how a certain value changes over time for the entire dataset (see this article) or you can only look at a specific data point. Lumen provides multiple visualisation options that are easy to set up, interactive and sharable either in your reports or online on your website or other channels. Are you not sure which visualisation type to select or how to set up the best visualisation to show change over time? Get inspired by a few examples and read more on how to set them up with Akvo Lumen.