In this DZone article by Russ Savage, a custom service input plugin for Telegraf is built to monitor cryptocurrency trends on Twitter. The plugin tracks keywords from live streams and sends them to InfluxDB for data storage. To set up the system, InfluxDB and the TICK Stack are first configured, followed by the development environment setup and the addition of the input plugin package to Telegraf. This allows users to effectively track and analyze cryptocurrency market trends in real-time.