Evaluation how-to guides

These guides answer “How do I….?” format questions. They are goal-oriented and concrete, and are meant to help you complete a specific task. For conceptual explanations see the Conceptual guide. For end-to-end walkthroughs see Tutorials. For comprehensive descriptions of every class and function see the API reference.

Offline evaluation

Evaluate and improve your application before deploying it.

Run an evaluation

• Run an evaluation
• Run an evaluation asynchronously
• Run an evaluation comparing two experiments
• Evaluate a langchain runnable
• Evaluate a langgraph graph
• Run an evaluation of an existing experiment
• Run an evaluation via the REST API
• Run an evaluation from the prompt playground

Define an evaluator

• Define a custom evaluator
• Define an LLM-as-a-judge evaluator
• Use an off-the-shelf evaluator via the SDK (Python only)
• Use an off-the-shelf evaluator via the UI
• Evaluate aggregate experiment results
• Evaluate intermediate steps
• Return multiple metrics in one evaluator
• Return categorical vs numerical metrics
• Check your evaluator setup

Configure the evaluation data

• Evaluate on a split / filtered view of a dataset
• Evaluate on a specific dataset version

Configure an evaluation job

• Evaluate with repetitions
• Run a large evaluation job
• Handle model rate limits

Unit testing

Unit test your system to identify bugs and regressions.

• Unit test applications (Python only)

Online evaluation

Evaluate and monitor your system's live performance on production data.

• Set up an online evaluator
• Create a few-shot evaluator

Automatic evaluation

Set up evaluators that automatically run for all experiments against a dataset.

• Set up an auto-evaluator
• Create a few-shot evaluator

Analyzing experiment results

Use the UI & API to understand your experiment results.

• Compare experiments with the comparison view
• Filter experiments
• View pairwise experiments
• Fetch experiment results in the SDK
• Upload experiments run outside of LangSmith with the REST API

Dataset management

Manage datasets in LangSmith used by your evaluations.

• Manage datasets from the UI
• Manage datasets programmatically
• Version datasets
• Share or unshare a dataset publicly
• Export filtered traces from an experiment to a dataset

Annotation queues and human feedback

Collect feedback from subject matter experts and users to improve your applications.

• Use annotation queues
• Capture user feedback from your application to traces
• Set up a new feedback criteria
• Annotate traces inline
• Audit and correct evaluator scores