The 5 LLM Evaluation Metrics That Actually Matter in Production

Which evaluation metrics actually correlate with user satisfaction and business outcomes in production? Here's how we think about the five that matter most.

Five metrics consistently stand out as the strongest signals of production success:

Notably absent: BLEU score, perplexity, and several other academic metrics that don't translate well to production settings.

Four of these — Faithfulness, Relevance, Completeness, and Toxicity — are available as built-in scorers in EvalGuard. Latency P95 is a production performance metric surfaced through EvalGuard's tracing and observability (aggregated across requests), not a per-run scorer. Run these on every deployment to catch regressions before your users do.