The Utility Panel is a multi-purpose panel that appears at the bottom of the Lister whenever certain functions are activated. It acts as a container for several different functions - various tools and log files are displayed that way.
When the utility panel is displayed, you can switch between its various modes using the dropdown in the title bar.
These are all accessed from the Tools menu:
These are all accessed from the Help / Logs menu.
The panel has a button in the top-right corner which shrinks (collapses) it down to just its title bar - this can be useful if, for example, you're running a long find operation and want to do other work while you're waiting.
Right-click the shrink button to show a context menu which lets you select whether the panel should be automatically shrunk when an operation starts. You can choose this separately for find, synchronize and find duplicates.