Evaluating RAG Quality

A working RAG pipeline is only the starting point. Without systematic evaluation, you have no way to know whether your retriever is fetching the right chunks, whether the LLM is faithfully using the retrieved context, or whether the generated answer actually addresses the user’s question. These failures are subtle — they don’t throw errors, they just produce worse answers. This cookbook walks you through Netra’s evaluation workflow: creating test evaluations from your traces, configuring evaluators that score RAG-specific quality dimensions, running test suites, and interpreting results to improve your pipeline.

Prerequisite: You need a RAG pipeline with Netra tracing configured and at least one trace visible in your dashboard. If you haven’t set this up yet, follow the Tracing a RAG Pipeline cookbook first.

What You’ll Learn

Create Evaluations from Traces

Turn real RAG interactions into reusable test cases directly from the dashboard

Configure Evaluators

Set up LLM-as-Judge evaluators for retrieval quality, answer correctness, and faithfulness

Run Test Suites

Execute evaluations via the dashboard or SDK and collect quality metrics

Analyze Results & Iterate

Interpret scores, debug failures using trace integration, and improve your pipeline

Why RAG Pipelines Need Evaluation

RAG systems have multiple failure modes that are invisible without structured evaluation:

Failure Mode	What Goes Wrong	Why You Can’t Spot-Check It
Irrelevant retrieval	The retriever fetches chunks that don’t contain the answer	Similarity scores look reasonable, but the content is off-topic
Hallucination	The LLM generates information not present in the retrieved context	The answer sounds fluent and confident, but fabricates details
Missed intent	The answer is factually correct but doesn’t address the user’s actual question	Only noticeable when you compare against a known-good response
Inconsistency	The same question gets different quality answers depending on retrieved chunks	Requires running the same inputs multiple times to detect

Netra’s evaluation framework addresses this with Evaluations (test cases with inputs and expected outputs), Evaluators (LLM-as-Judge or code-based scoring for relevance, correctness, and faithfulness), and Test Runs (execution results with pass/fail rates, scores, and linked traces). The workflow is: create test cases, attach evaluators, run, and review. See the Evaluation Overview for a deeper look at the framework.

Now, let’s walk through the process of evaluating a RAG pipeline:

Step 1: Create Evaluators

Go to Evaluation → Evaluators and add the following three evaluators from the library:

Evaluator	What It Measures
Answer Correctness	Is the generated answer factually correct compared to the expected output?
Context Relevance	Are the retrieved chunks relevant to the question being asked?
Faithfulness	Is the answer grounded in the retrieved context, without hallucination?

You can tune the prompt for each evaluator and test it in the Playground to see how it scores before using it in an evaluation. See Evaluators for the full reference.

Step 2: Create an Evaluation from Traces

Select a trace

Go to Observability → Traces and select a trace from the Tracing a RAG Pipeline cookbook, or any other RAG pipeline trace you have.

Add to Evaluation

Click on the trace, then click Add to Evaluation. Create a new evaluation called “RAG Quality Evaluation”.

Attach evaluators

Add the three evaluators you created in Step 1 to the evaluation.

Configure variable mapping

For each evaluator, map the prompt variables to their source — Test case field (input, expected output), Agent response (actual RAG output), or Execution data (trace metadata).

Step 3: Add More Test Cases

Add one more trace with a different question to the same evaluation by repeating the Add to Evaluation flow. Under Evaluate → Evaluations, you should now see the “RAG Quality Evaluation” with two test cases and three evaluators under the Evaluators tab, as shown in the video above. You can add more evaluators or test cases manually from this page.

Step 4: Trigger a Test Run

Currently in Netra, test runs are triggered via code. Copy the Evaluation ID from the evaluation page and use the code below.

from netra import Netra

Netra.init(app_name="rag-evaluation")

# Your RAG logic — wrap your pipeline in a function that takes
# an input string and returns the generated answer.
# Tip: if you followed the tracing cookbook, you can call chatbot.chat() here.
def rag_pipeline(input_data):
    response = chatbot.chat(input_data)
    return response["answer"]

dataset = Netra.evaluation.get_dataset(dataset_id="your-dataset-id")

result = Netra.evaluation.run_test_suite(
    name="RAG Quality Evaluation",
    data=dataset,
    task=rag_pipeline,
)

import { Netra } from "netra-sdk";

await Netra.init({ appName: "rag-evaluation" });

// Your RAG logic — wrap your pipeline in a function that takes
// an input string and returns the generated answer.
// Tip: if you followed the tracing cookbook, you can call chatbot.chat() here.
async function ragPipeline(inputData: string): Promise<string> {
  const response = await chatbot.chat(inputData);
  return response.answer;
}

const dataset = await Netra.evaluation.getDataset("your-dataset-id");

const result = await Netra.evaluation.runTestSuite(
  "RAG Quality Evaluation",
  dataset,
  ragPipeline,
);

For more details on the evaluation API, refer to the SDK documentation.

Step 5: View Results

Go to Evaluation → Test Runs to see your test run with its status. Click on the test run to see the result for each evaluator, for each test case — whether it passed or failed.

You can also click View Trace on any result to debug what went wrong or verify what was correct. See Test Runs for the full reference.

Interpreting Scores and Improving Quality

When evaluator scores are low, use this table to identify the likely cause and fix:

Low Score In	Likely Cause	How to Fix
Answer Relevance	Wrong chunks retrieved	Increase `top_k`, reduce chunk size, add overlap between chunks
Factual Accuracy	LLM misinterprets context	Improve the system prompt, lower temperature, use a stronger model
Coherence	Disjointed or repetitive response	Refine the system prompt to request structured answers
Faithfulness	Model hallucinating beyond context	Add explicit grounding instructions (e.g., “Only answer using the provided context”)

After making changes to your pipeline, re-run the evaluation against the same evaluation and compare results across test runs. Netra tracks all runs so you can see whether your changes improved quality.

Continuous Evaluation Strategy

For production RAG systems, run evaluations regularly:

On every deployment — Run your test suite in CI/CD before releasing changes to retrieval logic or prompts
Weekly benchmarks — Track quality trends over time to catch gradual degradation
After prompt changes — Measure the impact of system prompt modifications on all quality dimensions
After parameter tuning — Validate that changes to chunk size, top_k, or overlap actually improve quality

Trace Your RAG Pipeline

Set up comprehensive tracing for your RAG pipeline before evaluating

Evaluation Overview

Deep dive into Netra’s evaluation framework: evaluations, evaluators, and test runs

Evaluating Agent Decisions

Evaluate tool selection, escalation, and workflow completion in agents

A/B Testing Configurations

Compare different pipeline configurations systematically

Observability

Evaluation

Simulation

Evaluating RAG Quality

What You’ll Learn

Create Evaluations from Traces

Configure Evaluators

Run Test Suites

Analyze Results & Iterate

Why RAG Pipelines Need Evaluation

Step 1: Create Evaluators

Step 2: Create an Evaluation from Traces

Step 3: Add More Test Cases

Step 4: Trigger a Test Run

Step 5: View Results

Interpreting Scores and Improving Quality

Continuous Evaluation Strategy

See Also

Trace Your RAG Pipeline

Evaluation Overview

Evaluating Agent Decisions

A/B Testing Configurations

​What You’ll Learn

Create Evaluations from Traces

Configure Evaluators

Run Test Suites

Analyze Results & Iterate

​Why RAG Pipelines Need Evaluation

​Step 1: Create Evaluators

​Step 2: Create an Evaluation from Traces

​Step 3: Add More Test Cases

​Step 4: Trigger a Test Run

​Step 5: View Results

​Interpreting Scores and Improving Quality

​Continuous Evaluation Strategy

​See Also

Trace Your RAG Pipeline

Evaluation Overview

Evaluating Agent Decisions

A/B Testing Configurations

What You’ll Learn

Why RAG Pipelines Need Evaluation

Step 1: Create Evaluators

Step 2: Create an Evaluation from Traces

Step 3: Add More Test Cases

Step 4: Trigger a Test Run

Step 5: View Results

Interpreting Scores and Improving Quality

Continuous Evaluation Strategy

See Also