The team at Datadog created a custom dashboard to track the progress of their colleague, Christian, during his 6-day-run challenge. They used a simple crawler in Python with the Requests and BeautifulSoup libraries to extract data from the event website's HTML code, which included Christian's current ranking, total distance run, and other metrics. The extracted data was then fed into Datadog using StatsD and the Datadog agent, resulting in a live dashboard that displays meaningful metrics, videos, GIFs, and more, allowing the team to cheer Christian on throughout the challenge.