SQL Agent Job Reports default to UTF-8 encoding in v24 or superior

Products

• Automic Automation

Issue/Introduction

After upgrading to Automic Automation v24, SQL Agent job reports (found in the agent's temp directory or viewed via the AWI) are generated in UTF-8 format. Previously, in version 21, these reports were generated in ASCII/ISO-8859 format.

When viewing these reports with third-party tools or terminal emulators (e.g., SecureCRT) that are not configured for UTF-8, special characters may appear garbled (e.g., selçuk instead of selçuk).

Environment

• Automic Automation v24.x and higher
• SQL Agent
• Linux/Unix/Windows

Cause

Starting with version 24, the Automic Agents are natively UTF-8. This is a design change to provide worldwide language support. Consequently, all job reports generated by the v24 agents are natively encoded in UTF-8. There is no configuration parameter (such as UC_HOST_CODE) that can revert the agent's native report generation back to ASCII.

Resolution

To resolve issues where third-party tools cannot process UTF-8 reports, implement one of the following workarounds:

1. Adapt Third-Party Tools: Configure the tools processing the SQL output to support UTF-8 encoding.
2. Convert Encoding via iconv: Use the iconv utility within the job post-process or a subsequent script to convert the report to the desired legacy encoding before it is consumed by other tools.
   • Example command: iconv -f UTF-8 -t ISO-8859-1 input_file.txt > output_file.txt
3. Retain v21 Agents: If the legacy encoding is strictly required for compatibility, continue using the v21 SQL Agent, as it remains compatible with the v24 Automation Engine.

NOTE: please note that at the moment of the creation of this article v21 is no longer supported and the preferred option should be 1.