Building a basic agent is relatively easy. You just use a framework and follow common architectural patterns. However, turning that basic agent into something robust and production-ready is difficult. The true value of an agent comes precisely from this process.
Because LLMs are non-deterministic, an agent can arrive at the correct answer even while taking a strange path, and this is what makes debugging difficult. Effective agent evaluation shouldn't just look at the final output—it needs to evaluate what the agent knows, what actions it takes, and how it plans, all together.
Evaluation is the key means of turning an agent from a simple demo project into a production tool. Based on the Agent Evaluation chapter of Arize AI's 'AI Agents & Assistants Handbook' series, this article summarizes how to systematically evaluate agents.
☑️ Agent development is cyclical, not linear
All LLM application development involves some degree of cyclical iteration, and agents are no exception. It's impossible to predict in advance every query an agent might receive or every possible output from the model. Only by properly monitoring the production system and feeding the data it generates back into the development process can you build a truly robust system.
This iteration cycle typically proceeds as follows. First, create an initial set of representative test cases, break the agent down into individual steps (routers, skills, etc.), and then create evaluators for each step. Next, experiment with different versions of the agent while maximizing evaluation scores. Once the agent is deployed to production, monitoring is used to collect real-world usage data, and this data is used to revise the test cases, evaluation steps, and evaluators. Then experimentation and iteration are performed again.
This article examines each component of this cycle one by one.
☑️ Building test cases
Having a standard set of test cases lets you test changes to the agent, prevent unexpected performance regressions, and establish a baseline for evaluation.
Test cases don't need to be numerous, but they do need to be comprehensive. For example, if you're building a chatbot agent for a website, the test cases should include every type of query the agent supports: queries that trigger each function or skill, common informational queries, and off-topic queries the agent shouldn't respond to. The test cases should cover every path the agent can take. If a case is simply a rephrasing of another, there's no need to create thousands of them.
Test cases evolve over time as new types of input are discovered. Don't be afraid to add to them, even if it makes some evaluation results harder to compare against past runs.
☑️ How to break down the steps to evaluate
Next, break the agent down into manageable steps that can be evaluated individually. These steps should be fairly granular, at the level of individual units of work.
Every function, skill, and execution branch of the agent should have an evaluation that can benchmark its performance. You can be as granular as you like—for example, evaluating just the retrieval step of a RAG skill separately, or evaluating the response of an internal API call. Beyond skills, it's important to evaluate the router along multiple axes. If you're using a router, this is often where you can achieve the biggest performance gains.
The list of "pieces" that need to be evaluated can grow quickly, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Especially if you're new to agent development, it's recommended to start with many evaluations and reduce them over time.
☑️ Two ways to build evaluators
Once the steps are defined, you can create evaluators for each one. Evaluation is generally done in one of two ways.
☑️ Evaluating skills
Evaluating an agent's skill step is similar to evaluating that skill independently, outside the agent. What you evaluate depends on the type of skill.
For RAG skills:
For code generation skills:
For API skills:
Common to all skills:
☑️ Evaluating the router
Beyond skills, the most distinctive part of agent evaluation is router evaluation. The router should be evaluated along two axes.
Selecting the correct skill
The first axis is the ability to select the correct skill or function for a given input. This is perhaps the most important yet also the most difficult task. This is the step where the router prompt (if one exists) is put to the test. Low scores at this step are usually caused by a weak router prompt or unclear function descriptions, both of which are tricky to improve.
Extracting the correct parameters
The second axis is the ability to extract the correct parameters from the input to populate the function call. This is also tricky, especially when there's overlap between parameters. It's a good idea to add intentional curveballs to your test cases—for example, including inputs that stress-test the agent, such as a user asking about order status while also providing a shipping tracking number.
☑️ Evaluating the path
Finally, evaluate the path the agent takes during execution. Does it repeat steps? Does it fall into a loop? Does it unnecessarily return to the router? These "path errors" can cause the most serious bugs in an agent.
To evaluate the path, it's recommended to add a step/iteration counter as an evaluation item. Tracking the number of steps it takes the agent to complete different types of queries can yield useful statistics. However, the best way to debug an agent's path is to manually inspect the traces. Especially early in development, using an observability platform to directly review agent runs provides the most valuable insights for improvement.
Convergence
Extending path evaluation lets you measure convergence. In the context of agents, convergence refers to how often the agent takes the optimal path for a given query. You can measure whether the agent is "converging" on the optimal path for a particular query type.
Here's how to calculate a convergence score:
This score is a value between 0 and 1, showing how often the agent follows the optimal path for that query type, and how far it deviates when it takes a suboptimal path. However, there is a limitation: since the optimal path is calculated based on the agent's shortest run, cases where every run takes a suboptimal path cannot be detected by this method.
☑️ LLM-as-a-Judge agent evaluation templates
Arize AI provides pre-tested evaluation templates that have been stress-tested on benchmark datasets and tuned to 70–90% precision and 70–85% F1 scores. The key question each template answers is as follows.
☑️ The cycle of experimentation, iteration, and production
Once evaluators and test cases are defined, you're ready to modify the agent. After a major modification, run the test cases against the agent, then run each evaluator against the outputs or traces. You can track this process manually, or use an observability platform to track experiments and evaluation results.
There's no one-size-fits-all approach to improving an agent, but this evaluation framework gives you far greater visibility into the agent's behavior and performance. It also gives you confidence that your changes haven't unintentionally broken other parts of the application.
Once the agent is deployed to production, monitoring collects real-world usage data. New types of input or failure cases discovered in this data are added to the test cases, the evaluation steps and evaluators are revised, and experimentation and iteration are performed again. Since it's impossible to predict in advance every query an agent might receive, this cyclical structure of feeding production data back into the development process is the key to building a robust agent.
☑️ Conclusion
Agent evaluation isn't just about checking the accuracy of the final output. It requires systematically evaluating each component—whether the router selects the correct skill, whether each skill accurately performs its intended task, whether the agent follows an efficient path, and whether parameters are extracted correctly.
Through this series, we've looked at what AI agents are, how they're structured, what various architectures and frameworks exist, and how to observe and evaluate agents.
Cloud Networks, as Arize AI's official partner in Korea, supports the adoption and implementation of Arize AX, an AI agent observability and evaluation platform. If you're interested in quality management for AI agents, please reach out to Cloud Networks.
