
Galileo
AI observability & evaluation for production LLMs
What is Galileo?
Galileo, now part of Cisco, is an end-to-end evaluation engineering platform that takes the guesswork out of LLM quality. It bridges the gap between offline testing and live production monitoring, giving AI teams a unified toolkit to capture ground-truth data, auto-tune evaluation metrics, and enforce guardrails across every prompt and response. What sets Galileo apart is its Luna model distillation technology. Instead of running expensive LLM-as-a-judge evaluations on every single production call — which quickly becomes cost-prohibitive — Galileo compresses those evaluators into tiny, low-latency models that run at a fraction of the cost (≈97% savings). This means you can monitor 100% of your traffic in real time without blowing your budget. The platform ships with 20+ out-of-box evaluation templates covering RAG quality, agent behavior, safety, and security. You can also build custom evaluators tuned to your domain. The auto-tuning engine continuously refines metrics from live user feedback, ensuring your evaluations stay relevant as your models and data evolve. For teams building AI agents, Galileo's insights engine is a standout feature. It analyzes millions of signals — traces, prompts, function calls — to surface hidden failure patterns like hallucinations, tool-selection errors, or drift. Better yet, it suggests fixes: add few-shot examples, tweak prompts, or adjust guardrails. Deployment is flexible. You can run Galileo as a managed SaaS, inside your VPC, or fully on-premises. Enterprise features include RBAC, SSO, custom rate limits, and dedicated support channels. The free tier (5,000 traces/month) makes it easy to start small, while Pro and Enterprise tiers scale with your needs. If you're building production-grade LLM applications and need observability that doesn't break the bank, Galileo deserves a close look.
How to Use Galileo
Getting started with Galileo is quick thanks to its generous free tier and extensive documentation. You can have your first evaluation pipeline running in minutes by following these simple steps.
Sign Up and Create a Workspace
Register for a free account at galileo.ai and verify your email. The Free tier gives you 5,000 traces per month, unlimited users, and unlimited custom evals to start experimenting immediately without any financial commitment.
Connect Your LLM Application
Use Galileo's API or SDK to instrument your LLM application. The platform supports popular models like GPT-4o and GPT-4.1-mini, allowing you to start sending traces and prompts for evaluation right away with minimal code changes.
Configure Your First Evaluation
Choose from 20+ out-of-box evaluation templates for RAG, agent behavior, safety, or security. Alternatively, build a custom evaluator tailored to your domain using the Custom Eval Builder and enable auto-tuning for continuous improvement from live feedback.
Deploy Production Guardrails
Distill your evaluations into low-latency Luna models and deploy them as guardrails on 100% of production traffic. Use the Guardrail Policy Builder to set up block/allow rules without writing glue code, and enforce policies in real time.
Monitor and Iterate with Insights
Use the Insights Engine to analyze millions of traces, detect failure patterns like hallucinations or drift, and receive automated fix recommendations. Continuously refine your evaluations based on real production data to keep your models aligned with user needs.
Galileo Core Features
Galileo Use Cases
- 1AI Agent Debugging: Detect hallucinations, tool-selection errors, and multi-step failure modes in AI agents. Galileo's insights engine analyzes millions of traces to surface hidden failure patterns and provides automated fix recommendations, like adding few-shot examples when bad tool inputs cause errors in agent workflows.
- 2RAG & Retrieval Evaluation: Measure relevance, factuality, and citation quality of retrieval-augmented generation pipelines. Use out-of-box evaluation templates and auto-tuned metrics to ensure your RAG system delivers accurate, well-grounded responses that cite sources correctly.
- 3Safety & Security Guardrails: Block harmful, toxic, or policy-violating responses in real time using low-latency Luna models. Enforce guardrails across 100% of production traffic without the latency and cost overhead of running full LLM-as-judge evaluations on every request.
- 4Production Monitoring: Continuously evaluate every live inference to catch drift, bias, performance degradation, or unexpected failures. Galileo's insights engine flags anomalies early, allowing teams to intervene before issues impact end users at scale.
- 5Model Development & Iteration: Auto-tune evaluation metrics from real user feedback and feed insights back into training pipelines. This closes the loop between production monitoring and model improvement, enabling rapid iteration that keeps models aligned with real-world usage patterns.
Pros and Cons of Galileo
Pros
- End-to-end evaluation lifecycle: From ground-truth data capture to production guardrails, Galileo replaces a fragmented stack of point tools with a single unified platform that covers every stage of LLM quality assurance.
- Cost-effective production monitoring: Luna model distillation reduces evaluation costs by approximately 97% compared to running full LLM judges, making it feasible to monitor 100% of traffic in real time without prohibitive compute expenses.
- Auto-tuning keeps evaluations relevant: Metrics continuously adapt from live user feedback rather than relying on static baselines, ensuring your evaluations stay aligned with evolving model behavior and real-world data distributions.
- Flexible deployment for enterprise needs: With SaaS, VPC, and on-premises options alongside RBAC, SSO, and dedicated support, Galileo accommodates strict security, compliance, and latency requirements across regulated industries.
✕ Cons
- Trace-based pricing can scale steeply: While the free tier is generous, large deployments processing millions of traces may see significant cost increases. Teams need to monitor trace volume carefully to avoid unexpected bills.
- Enterprise procurement requires sales engagement: The enterprise tier is custom-priced and requires talking to sales, which can slow down adoption for teams that need quick deployment without lengthy procurement cycles.
- Limited transparency on Luna accuracy: As a proprietary distillation technology, Luna models lack the public benchmarking and transparency of open-source evaluation approaches. Users must trust Galileo's internal validation without independent third-party comparisons.
Galileo vs Top Alternatives
| Feature | LangSmith | Arize AI | WhyLabs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Production Guardrails on 100% Traffic | Limited to LangChain ecosystem traces | Guardrails via Phoenix add-on, not native | Monitoring alerts rather than full guardrails |
| Model Distillation for Cost Reduction (≈97%) | No proprietary model distillation technology | No equivalent to Luna distillation | No model distillation capability |
| Auto-Tuned Metrics from Live Feedback | Static evaluation templates without auto-tuning | Drift-focused monitoring, not auto-tuned evals | Static threshold-based monitors |
| Deployment Flexibility (SaaS/VPC/On-Prem) | SaaS-only deployment with no VPC/on-prem options | SaaS and self-hosted deployment options | SaaS and self-hosted deployment options |
Galileo Pricing
Free
- 5,000 traces per month
- Unlimited users
- Unlimited custom evals
- 20+ out-of-box evaluation templates
- Community support
Pro
- 50,000 traces per month
- Standard RBAC
- Advanced analytics & dashboards
- Slack support
- Annual billing discount (33%)
Enterprise
- Unlimited traces
- Custom rate limits
- VPC or on-premises deployment
- SSO & custom security policies
- Dedicated CSM & 24/7 support
- Low-latency dedicated inference servers
Galileo FAQ
What is Galileo AI?+
How does Luna model distillation work?+
Is there a free tier available?+
What types of evaluations does Galileo support?+
Can Galileo be deployed on-premises?+
How does Galileo differ from LangSmith or Arize AI?+
What does the Cisco acquisition mean for Galileo users?+
Galileo Review — Editor's Score
Who Should Use Galileo?
AI engineering teams building production-grade LLM applications who need comprehensive evaluation, monitoring, and guardrail enforcement without breaking the bank. Ideal for organizations that prioritize model safety, compliance, and real-time observability across their AI stack.
Galileo is a powerful end-to-end evaluation platform that stands out for its Luna model distillation technology and auto-tuning metrics. While pricing can scale steeply for large deployments and the enterprise tier requires sales contact, the free tier and Pro plan make it accessible for teams of all sizes. It's a strong choice for organizations serious about LLM quality in production.
- Luna model distillation reduces evaluation costs by ~97% while enabling real-time monitoring of 100% of production traffic.
- Auto-tuning metrics continuously adapt from live feedback, keeping evaluations aligned with real-world usage patterns.
- End-to-end workflow from ground-truth capture to production guardrails in a single unified platform.
User Reviews
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📺 Galileo Tutorials & Introduction
Exploring Galileo AI: An AI-Powered Design Tool - YouTube
The New Agent Observability Playbook: Galileo Demo - YouTube
Monitor Your LangChain Agents with Galileo: A Step-by-Step Tutorial
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