Utilyze: Open-Source GPU Monitor That Measures Real Compute Throughput, Not Just Kernel Activity

The standard GPU utilization metric used by nvidia-smi, nvtop, Weights & Biases, Amazon CloudWatch, Google Cloud Monitoring, and Azure Monitor is misleading. It reports the fraction of time any kernel is running, so a GPU can show 100% utilization while only using 1-10% of real compute capacity. Teams relying on this for capacity planning may think systems are saturated when they're actually underutilized.

Utilyze

SysTalize released Utilyze (utlz), an open-source (Apache 2.0) tool that measures GPU utilization differently. Instead of kernel activity, 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.

Installation

curl -fsSL https://systalyze.com/utilyze/install.sh | bash

Utilyze runs alongside any AI workload in real time with negligible overhead. In production deployments, it has revealed orders-of-magnitude performance headroom in systems that standard tools declared fully saturated.

Why This Matters

AI compute is scarce: H100 one-year rental contracts rose ~40% from October 2025 to March 2026, and lead times for GPUs stretch months. Wasted spend on unnecessary hardware and energy is massive. Accurate measurement is the prerequisite for optimization — every percentage point of real throughput recovered saves money and resources.

Check the GitHub repo: https://github.com/systalyze/utilyze