Safety is often discussed as policy text. In production, safety must be measurable. A safety dashboard is a set of operational signals that detect unsafe drift and make release decisions defensible.
Start with safety failure modes
Safety metrics should map to concrete failures:
- Hallucinated claims. Confident answers without evidence.
- Wrong refusals. Refusing safe requests, breaking user workflows.
- Under-refusals. Allowing disallowed content or unsafe actions.
- Sensitive disclosures. Leaking PII or confidential data.
Use a shared taxonomy so teams triage consistently (see error taxonomy).
Safety SLIs that are practical
Teams often over-index on a single "toxicity" score. More useful safety SLIs include:
- Grounding rate. Percentage of answers with citations for workflows that require evidence (see citations and grounding).
- Faithfulness checks. Automated checks that claims align with cited sources (where feasible).
- Refusal correctness. Sampled scoring of refusal decisions on boundary cases (see policy layering).
- Disclosure signals. Output scanning hits and near-misses (see DLP for LLMs).
- Tool safety. Rate of denied high-risk tool actions and approval outcomes (see approvals).
Combine automated scoring with review loops
Many safety nuances require review. Use a hybrid approach:
- LLM-as-a-judge. Fast scoring with calibration and drift checks (see LLM-as-a-judge evaluation).
- Human review. Structured review queues for high-severity intents (see human review operations).
Make safety observable in production
Safety SLIs require telemetry that captures prompt versions, policy versions, retrieved sources, and tool outcomes (see telemetry schema). Pair dashboards with synthetic monitoring that runs golden queries continuously (see synthetic monitoring).
Use SLOs and release gates
Dashboards become operational controls when they drive decisions. Tie safety SLIs to SLO thresholds and error budgets so teams know when to pause changes and stabilise (see SLO playbooks and change freeze).
Connect to incident response
When safety signals breach, teams need runbooks and fast levers: feature flags, routing fallbacks, or tool disablement (see incident response and alerting and runbooks).
Measurable safety is how organisations move from policy intent to operational reality.