Abstract: IceCube has detected high energy neutrinos from the galactic plane of the Milky Way galaxy at a significance of 4.5 sigma, establishing evidence for the Milky Way as a source of neutrinos. Now, I investigate the extent to which we can characterize the diffuse flux from the Milky way using a combination of IceCube datasets and present my plan for the analysis. I will also discuss my work developing a new event selection for the real-time neutrino alerts that IceCube sends out to the multi-messenger astrophysics community.