I’m working through a tutorial series on LangSmith and I’ve reached the section about setting up automations and doing online evaluation. This is the fifth part out of six total parts in the guide.
I’m having trouble understanding how to properly configure the automated processes and implement real-time evaluation features. The documentation seems a bit confusing and I want to make sure I’m following the right steps.
Can someone explain the best practices for setting up these automation workflows? Also, what’s the difference between online evaluation and the regular evaluation methods we used in earlier parts of this tutorial?
Any examples or step-by-step guidance would be really helpful since I want to get this right before moving on to the final part of the series.
Online evaluation runs during real user interactions instead of on test datasets. You get actual performance metrics, but it’s trickier since failures can’t break the user experience. For automation, nail your error handling first. When evaluations fail, you need fallbacks so production keeps running. I learned this the hard way - an evaluation service died and killed my entire pipeline. Start with conservative timeouts and tweak from there. Online evaluations have unpredictable timing compared to static testing. Use circuit breakers too - if latency spikes, temporarily disable evaluation rather than hurt user experience. The tutorial probably skips this, but you’ll need different automation configs for each environment. What works in dev usually needs tweaking for production traffic.
Had the same struggles with that tutorial series last year. Online evaluation monitors your model against real user queries in production, while earlier methods test against fixed datasets you prep beforehand. For automation, define your evaluation metrics clearly before setting up triggers. Start with time-based automation instead of event-driven - it’s easier. Webhook config is tricky - format your endpoint responses correctly or you’ll get silent failures. Online evaluation adds latency to production calls, which the tutorial barely mentions but matters at scale. Use sampling instead of evaluating every request. Test your automation workflows in staging first. I had expensive runs early on from misconfigured triggers.
Running production automations taught me some hard lessons. Online evaluation measures performance on real user interactions, not test data. More realistic but way harder to debug.
Set up monitoring dashboards before automating anything. You need visibility when evaluations run automatically. LangSmith’s logs get overwhelming without proper filtering.
Batch your evaluations instead of running them individually. Much more efficient and you’ll spot failure patterns easier. Keep evaluation functions stateless too - shared state caused random failures that drove me crazy.
This walkthrough covers automation setup well:
Wish I’d known earlier - set up alerts for evaluation failures. Silent failures are the worst. You think everything’s working until you realize no results came in for days.
Been there with complex automation setups. LangSmith’s automation gets messy fast when you’re juggling multiple evaluation pipelines.
Online evaluation runs against live user interactions. Regular evaluation uses static test sets. Online eval shows real performance as users actually use your system.
Start with simple scheduled evaluations first. But managing all these moving parts in LangSmith becomes a nightmare at scale.
I pull everything into Latenode now. Set up automated triggers that run your LangSmith evaluations, collect results, and route them to different systems based on performance thresholds. Way cleaner than managing it all in LangSmith.
Latenode handles orchestration while LangSmith does what it’s good at - evaluation logic. Better monitoring and more flexibility for complex automation flows.
totally get it! online eval’s more about real-time feedback with live data, unlike the regular stuff that’s based on pre-set datasets. for automations, begin with basic triggers—get those down first, then you can build on that. langsmith’s webhook thing is handy if you set it up correctly!
