eBay's transition from custom UIs to Grafana plugins marked a significant shift in their monitoring and logging approach, as highlighted by Vijay Samuel at GrafanaCon. Initially, the quality of custom UIs for logging and metrics at eBay depended heavily on individual developers, leading to inconsistent experiences. Samuel's initial proof of concept with Grafana, although rudimentary, laid the groundwork for a more structured solution. The involvement of the Database Ops team, along with the adoption by eBay's SREs, facilitated the development of a dedicated data source plugin with enhanced features such as Docker support and Kubernetes deployment scripts. This shift allowed eBay to overlay data on graphs, catch issues like DNS flips, and provide hosted solutions, eventually leading to Grafana becoming a first-class citizen in their offerings. The monitoring team migrated to more cloud-native solutions for metrics and logging, while also contributing to open-source projects like Elastic Beats. This transformation eased the process of creating dashboards and demonstrated the power of Grafana to streamline monitoring efforts across the company.