A Practical Guide to Building the Right Agent Evals

Effective LLM agent evaluation should begin with observed production failures rather than selecting generic metrics first, because valid measurements can still overlook issues that matter to users. Evaluation design should account for metric output type, relevant modalities, whether interactions are single- or multi-turn, and the appropriate use of deterministic code checks versus LLM-based judges. Teams should use tracing and automated issue discovery to identify failures in real traffic, then rely on human review to validate and categorize them before converting important cases into regression datasets and targeted metrics. Evaluation programs benefit from stable review cycles that preserve consistent datasets, thresholds, taxonomies, and judge models, allowing teams to distinguish genuine product changes from measurement drift. Since products, users, and models continually change, agent evaluation is presented as an ongoing feedback loop connecting production observations, automated discovery, human validation, metrics, and regression testing.

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