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# Evaluate your agents

Astropods can automatically grade an agent's production traces against a set of evaluators, surfacing issues like exposed personal data, leaked credentials, or negative user sentiment.

## What evals are for

Use evals to:

* Catch regressions in an agent's output, such as exposed personal data, leaked credentials, or responses that reveal system instructions.
* Score behavior that is hard to assert on directly, like whether a tool call was unnecessary or whether the user's tone turned negative.

Evaluators don't block a deploy or change agent behavior; they grade traces after the fact. Verified evaluator outputs can also be curated into a dataset for comparing future runs.

## How it works

In the dashboard, go to an agent's **Traces & Evals** page to run and review evals. You run the agent's active evaluation set against its recent production traces. Each evaluator grades a trace independently and doesn't change agent behavior.

## The default evaluation set

Every agent evaluates against the Astropods default evaluation set until you activate a custom one. See the preset registry in the [Evaluator Spec](/evaluator-spec#appendix-a-preset-registry-non-normative) for the full list of default evaluators and what each one checks.

## Set custom evaluators

To run different checks, add an `EVALUATION.yaml` file beside `astropods.yml` at your project root, listing the presets to keep and any custom evaluators you define. Validate it locally, then activate it against the server:

```bash
ast eval validate
ast eval push
```

`ast eval push` requires a blueprint that's already been pushed; it only activates the evaluation set and doesn't build or push a container image. Activating a custom set replaces the default set entirely, it isn't merged with it. An agent with no activated set falls back to the Astropods default.

See the [Evaluator Spec](/evaluator-spec) for the full `EVALUATION.yaml` format: preset references, custom evaluator fields, additional trace context, and output schemas.

## Next steps

* [Evaluator Spec](/evaluator-spec) — the full `EVALUATION.yaml` format and the default preset registry
* [Monitor your agents](/monitor-agents) — the trace collection that evals run against