📊 Built-in evaluation harness with recommended metrics and benchmark datasets

[CharnaParkey]

Today, you can hook up any evaluation harness to OpenRAG using OpenTelemetry. But we're considering providing an out-of-the-box evaluation harness that gives you everything you need to get started immediately.

What would be included:

1. Recommended Metrics - Curated set of metrics you should be tracking:

• Answer quality (relevance, accuracy, faithfulness/groundedness)
• Retrieval performance (precision, recall, MRR, NDCG)
• Latency and response time
• Context utilization
• Cost per query

2. Benchmark Datasets - Standard datasets to measure against:

• Industry-standard RAG benchmarks
• Domain-specific test sets
• Comparison baselines for common use cases

3. Synthetic Data Generation - Generate test data on demand:

• Automatically create evaluation questions from your documents
• Generate diverse query variations
• Create edge cases and stress tests
• Build regression test suites

How it would work:

1. Install OpenRAG → configure OpenRAG with your preferred models -> evaluation harness ready to use
2. Run baseline evaluation on provided benchmark datasets
3. Upload your own documents, make modifications to underlying flows etc
4. Generate synthetic test data from your own documents
5. Track metrics over time as you improve your pipeline
6. Compare against benchmarks and your own baselines

Why this matters:

• No setup required - Start evaluating immediately (vs. hooking up your own harness)
• Best practices built-in - Know what to measure without being an expert
• Apples-to-apples comparison - Benchmark against standard datasets
• Test data generation - Don't need to manually create test sets
• Catch regressions - Automated testing before you ship changes

Questions for the community:

• Which metrics would be most valuable to have out of the box?
• What benchmark datasets would help you most? (general, domain-specific, multilingual?)
• For synthetic data generation: what kinds of test queries would you want generated?
• How would you want to view/export results? (UI dashboard, CLI reports, CI/CD integration?)
• Would you want this integrated with existing eval frameworks or standalone?

Vote with 👍 if you'd use this feature!

Tell us: How do you evaluate your RAG applications today? What makes it painful?