Miguel, do you have a CF appliance running that I can access with this issue present? I don't have access to a real VMware environment right now. Does the error appear immediately or does it take some time? If I can look at the appliance I can see if the error is coming from the initial request to start data collection or the task that is updated during data collection.

This is definitely an issue on the backend, though. The data collection happens as a result of this request (where 1,2,3 are the CF ids corresponding to the VMware providers):
POST /api/red_hat_migration_analytics
Body: { "action": "bundle", "provider_ids": ["1", "2", "3"] }

The response will either directly contain the error message or it will contain a `task_href` which can be used to fetch the bundle task, which will contain the error message.

This API request is handled on the backend by this code (from Drew and Adam): https://github.com/RedHatCloudForms/cfme-migration_analytics/blame/master/app/controllers/api/red_hat_migration_analytics_controller.rb#L16
And the bundle itself is handled by this code (from Adam): https://github.com/RedHatCloudForms/cfme-cloud_services/blame/master/lib/cfme/cloud_services/inventory_sync.rb#L38

So the issue is probably somewhere in there. Do either of you guys know what might cause this?

Adam, do you know why this file would be causing `Encoding::UndefinedConversionError ("\xA9" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8)`? I'm not too familiar with how ASCII and UTF work in ruby/rails, but from what I can find, \xA9 (169) in ASCII is the ® symbol which isn't present in this file.

Would you mind if I assign this one to you? (or Miguel, who else do you think it should be assigned to? Maybe Peter?) I'm not sure where to start here.

Hey Jerry, Adam advised me to assign this to you. Let me know if I can help.

I've just looked at the file in question on the VM in question, and collected it via SSA and downloaded the collected file to my own laptop.  The checksums of the files match.  The files are identical.  I can see the *copyright* symbol in both files.  IF there is an issue it is not with SSA.  Reassigning back to Mike.

Jerry, where in that yml file are you seeing the *copyright* symbol? I'm searching for it and not seeing it... I'm sure I'm just missing it though, because it's clearly causing the error here, just curious for my own sanity :)

I don't have a lot of Ruby experience and I don't know much about the code in question, but based on https://stackoverflow.com/a/13008475 it seems like maybe we need to call `force_encoding` before we call `to_json` here: https://github.com/RedHatCloudForms/cfme-cloud_services/blob/master/lib/cfme/cloud_services/data_packager.rb#L9
I'm not sure which ASCII encoding we would need to specify though. I could try to draft a PR, but I'd like to run this by someone who might catch something I'm not seeing here. Not sure who that would be.

Hey Peter, sorry to drop this in your lap but Brett told me you may be a good resource to help with this, as you're well versed in Ruby. Do you know the right way to fix this `Encoding::UndefinedConversionError`?

Hi Brett,

Sorry I lost track of this. I determined it was a backend issue, but we never found someone with that domain knowledge to reassign it to. We should assign this to someone who can troubleshoot the Ruby error detailed above (I tracked it down to this line: https://github.com/RedHatCloudForms/cfme-cloud_services/blob/master/lib/cfme/cloud_services/data_packager.rb#L9). I tried to figure it out and gave up, but I could give it another shot.

I think we can close this as we wouldn't expect SmartState to be able to read and display the contents of a binary file anyway.

Closing per Peter's recommend.