Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool more accurate than nvtop

Published: (April 27, 2026 at 09:55 AM EDT)
1 min read

Source: Hacker News

Description

The standard GPU utilization metric reported by nvidia-smi, nvtop, Weights & Biases, Amazon CloudWatch, Google Cloud Monitoring, and Azure Monitor is highly misleading. It reports the fraction of time that any kernel is running on the GPU, which means a GPU can report 100 % utilization even if only a small portion of its compute capacity is actually being used. In practice, workloads can have ~1–10 % real compute throughput while dashboards show 100 %.

This becomes a problem when teams rely on that metric for capacity planning or optimization decisions, as it can make underutilized systems look saturated.

We’re releasing an open‑source (Apache 2.0) tool, Utilyze, to measure GPU utilization differently. It samples hardware performance counters and reports compute and memory throughput relative to the hardware’s theoretical limits. It also estimates an attainable utilization ceiling for a given workload.

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