Show HN: We Built Our Own Chart Type for Live Dashboards

Most analytics tools give you 10–15 chart types and call it a day. But what happens when none of them actually represent your data well?

We ran into this when building a CRM dashboard. We wanted to show how sales reps connect to open deals: not just totals, but actual relationships. A bar chart was too flat, a table too dense. We needed a network graph.

The problem? Most chart libraries and BI tools don’t support that out of the box. You either say “no” to the feature request, or you hack together a standalone visualization that breaks the product’s flow (no filters, no interactivity, no theming).

So we built it ourselves, but in a way that still plays nicely with the rest of the dashboard. Luzmo now lets you define your own chart type, write your own visualization code, and then drop it into the dashboard editor like any other chart. Luzmo still handles the boring stuff: querying, filtering, theming, and cross-chart linking.

The end result: - Sales reps become nodes in a network graph, with open deals orbiting around them. - Deal size controls node size; win probability controls color. - Everything responds to filters and interacts with other charts out of the box.

The tutorial and GitHub repo walk through the whole process: setting up the builder, defining data slots, writing render methods, and packaging it all up for deployment.

I’d love to hear from others who’ve solved similar problems: - Have you ever needed a chart type your BI tool didn’t support? - Did you build it yourself, or find a workaround? - How important is native interactivity vs. just embedding a standalone visualization?

Read the post + see the full code: https://www.luzmo.com/blog/build-custom-charts