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

https://www.systalyze.com/utilyze

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, we've seen workloads with ~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, 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.

GitHub link: https://github.com/systalyze/utilyze

We'd love to hear your thoughts!

( 28 comments | 7 points | on HN )
Re:Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool mor... by xtimecrystal on Monday April 27, 2026 @12:30PM (#47923754)
One small suggestion: add more GPU stats to your tool.

At the moment (v0.1.3) it is more helpful for compute visualization but keeping track of memory usage/processes/temperature/fan speed/etc. prevent this from becoming a full-on drop-in replacement for `nvidia-smi` for me.

Re:Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool mor... by ManyaGhobadi on Monday April 27, 2026 @01:38PM (#47924721)
We agree! We are planning a "process" or "advanced" view with temp/power usage and per-process breakdowns. Would a separate full page view or fitting everything onto one view be more useful for your workflows? Just thinking about fitting everything in because it is a lot
Re:Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool mor... by nawi on Monday April 27, 2026 @01:10PM (#47924345)
Hi, many thx, does the os can run on nvidia jetson and orin? Or just for server gpu?
Re:Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool mor... by ManyaGhobadi on Monday April 27, 2026 @01:45PM (#47924824)
Currently just server GPU, but theoretically it should be easy to link against the ARM64 CUDA libraries for Jetson/Orin. The only challenge would be to check if it supports all the metrics we're sampling, though anything Ampere or newer should have reasonable support.
Re:Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool mor... by jhgg on Monday April 27, 2026 @01:20PM (#47924485)
We just track power utilization.
Re:Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool mor... by moconnor on Monday April 27, 2026 @06:29PM (#47928259)
This is an incredibly good first approximation and is often all you need.

Source: spent a couple of years developing an energy and performance profiler for cpus and gpus with various government labs.

Re:Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool mor... by uberduper on Monday April 27, 2026 @01:27PM (#47924566)
There's a few dimensions you can look at for gpu load. Probably the easiest indirect metric to watch for gpu load is power usage.

But if you really care about this, you should actually profile your application. nsight systems makes this pretty simple to do. Dunno how many actually care about having a TUI.

Re:Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool mor... by ManyaGhobadi on Monday April 27, 2026 @02:11PM (#47925149)
Power is useful as a second-order metric and can help catch drastic underutilization, but it has similar problems to SM Active (DCGM) -- it tends to overestimate utilization and doesn't distinguish between useful compute and memory traffic. It's very possible to be in a memory-bound workload with high power even though underutilizing compute utilization. Our goal was to separate these bottlenecks out so there's more visibility into where to optimize.

On nsys, agreed it's great, but we wanted something that could run continuously instead of an offline analysis tool. We think there's room for both to be useful.

Re:Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool mor... by latchkey on Monday April 27, 2026 @02:06PM (#47925089)
You mention rocm-smi in your blog post, but you don't actually support AMD gpus?
Re:Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool mor... by taupi on Monday April 27, 2026 @04:56PM (#47927202)
AMD support is on the roadmap, but we mentioned it for now to highlight that AMD calculates their utilization metric the same way -- it's not just NVIDIA.
Re:Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool mor... by SilentM68 on Monday April 27, 2026 @03:29PM (#47926173)
Great tool.

Just testing for now.

Any removal instructions or function for utilyze beyond the manual removal of utilyze & utlz binaries from ~/.local/bin & /usr/local/bin & PATH cleanup for ~/.profile, in particular CAP_SYS_ADMIN capability and reversal for any other changes made?

Re:Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool mor... by ManyaGhobadi on Monday April 27, 2026 @05:00PM (#47927243)
If you installed CUPTI via utlz on initial startup, you can also remove that in ~/.cache/utlz. There is also a config in ~/.systalyze if you'd like to fully clean up everything. Besides those things, the steps you mentioned should be enough. We'll add this info to the README.
Re:Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool mor... by SilentM68 on Monday April 27, 2026 @05:09PM (#47927344)
Thank you :)
Re:Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool mor... by Cynddl on Monday April 27, 2026 @03:38PM (#47926303)
This sounds super interesting and relevant. I run a small cluster with H100s (often research projects with vLLM) and being able to see not just usage but efficiency would be great.

I don't fully get the 100% utilisation vs. 1-10% real compute. Given you rely on telemetry from users to add new models, are you trying to predict how fast a model should be on vLLM, compared to how it runs in practice? What if users tweak some hyperparameters?

Re:Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool mor... by taupi on Monday April 27, 2026 @05:11PM (#47927359)
Glad you found it interesting!

What you described is the goal of Attainable SOL, but using GPU utilization as the metric rather than throughput. We're answering "for a given model and workload, have you optimized this well enough?", where "optimized" includes hyperparameter tuning. So if someone hasn't tuned batch size, parallelism, or other knobs well for their workload, the gap between their current utilization and the Attainable SOL is what tells them there's still room to improve.

We're motivated by the fact that reaching 100% Compute SOL is impossible -- no model can run at the hardware's theoretical maximum -- but we want to provide a realistic target for optimization. And we've noticed that different model architectures have different realistic ceilings. For example, MoE models run at much worse utilization due to their sparsity. We don't expect you to retrain an MoE model in order to get a higher utilization, and no hyperparameter tuning can bring you close to 100%, so the maximum attainable SOL should be lower for that model.

Re:Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool mor... by apitman on Monday April 27, 2026 @04:06PM (#47926640)
I believe recent versions of nvtop show efficiency, right?
Re:Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool mor... by taupi on Monday April 27, 2026 @04:53PM (#47927167)
There's a new "Effective Load" metric that we've looked at -- it's derived from Power, which has the same problems we mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47925149

It's useful as a rough heuristic, but tends to overestimate utilization. We've also noticed that power-derived metrics have a lag time behind true utilization, the controller that regulates it has a delayed response time. This especially becomes important for spiky workloads like real-time inference.

Any tool (like nvtop) that only queries NVIDIA's NVML library does not have access to the detailed metrics that we draw upon, and therefore has to use proxies for efficiency.

Re:Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool mor... by 324 on Monday April 27, 2026 @04:30PM (#47926922)
gdp means gross domestic product
Re:Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool mor... by vogje01 on Monday April 27, 2026 @05:18PM (#47927450)
Looks good for now.

Will further test it.

Re:Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool mor... by xrd on Monday April 27, 2026 @05:32PM (#47927592)
I feel like this is tangential to this conversation.

Does anyone know of a good tool for "load balancing" usage across local GPUs?

Why: I have two RTX3090s (24GB). I've been using nvidia-smi to check usage of my RTX3090. Mostly I'm running llama.cpp with unsloth/Qwen3.6-27B-GGUF:Q4_K_M and getting some pretty decent results for a self hosted LLMs (orchestrated via opencode). I'm surprised at how well it is working for a local model. nvidia-smi is great for determining total VRAM usage and nvtop gives a little more insight.

But, I also am doing some experiments with some other non-LLM models (video generation, etc), and want to find a way to timeslice across these GPUs, for example, when my coding is paused.

This "Utilyze" tool appears it would get me better insight into usage of one. Can it be scripted to better utilize my GPUs across a diverse load?

Any suggestions on whether there are existing projects out there? I thought about vibe coding, but wonder if there is existing art.

Re:Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool mor... by hmokiguess on Monday April 27, 2026 @06:30PM (#47928266)
Re:Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool mor... by xrd on Monday April 27, 2026 @06:46PM (#47928369)
Yes, thanks. Interesting project. Not exactly what I need but maybe I can hack on it.
Re:Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool mor... by whatever1 on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @01:02AM (#47930610)
I really don’t understand how Intel has not completely dominated the computational GPU market.

Nvidia’s toolsets and APIs are under-documented, and the commercial-grade hardware itself is super unreliable.

Developers and operators just bear with the whole situation because there is no alternative. To the point that they are ready to jump to things like TPUs or other custom silicon.

Say what you will about Intel, but their documentation and the commercial-grade hardware were top-notch. I wish they find their footing and this time stay humble.

Re:Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool mor... by souravroy78 on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @05:44AM (#47932308)
awesome work though! Much needed for Nvidia Folks!
Re:Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool mor... by javiercarballo on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @06:09AM (#47932450)
Useful, will try this.

One thing I'd love to see in tools like this is a "memory pressure"view that shows not just current VRAM usage but how close you are to the OOM cliff for the workload you're running. Running quantized LLMs on consumer GPUs (e.g. Q4_K_M Gemma 4 E4B on an 8GB card), you can be at 95% utilization and totally fine, or at 80% and one context spike away from a crash. nvtop and nvidia-smi give you the number but not the headroom.

Whether that's feasible without instrumenting the workload specifically is another question. But it's the metric I actually care about when I'm picking quantization levels.

Re:Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool mor... by villgax on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @07:37AM (#47933040)
This is actually amazing to quickly figure out whether to switch to HBM or stay on GDDR GPUs
Re:Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool mor... by smcleod on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @09:12AM (#47934105)
Is the source open and inspectable somewhere before installing this on a machine?
Re:Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool mor... by smcleod on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @06:45PM (#47941872)