Names with special characters are not parsed correctly in Apptio from Service Now.

Currently I'm configuring Apptio to work together with Service Now. My Service Now SME confirms that data is stored in Service Now with Latin Windows-1252 character encoding (which is Service Now's default). 

I setup a DataLink connection using Windows 1252 and Apptio recognizes this is the character encoding (import step shows this is being used). 

Unfortunately special characters (ø, ä, æ, å for example) in people's names are parsed with "?". Downloading the raw data from the upload step and opening it in Notepad++ confirms the data is not received correctly by Apptio. 

What can I do to fix this? 

I tried various character encoding settings in DataLink, but the usual suspects don't seem to work (UTF-8, ISO 8859-15). Also set all to autodetect doesn't work, I started with that. 

I expect changing the default character encoding in Service Now to UTF-8 could be a solution, but I would like to save that for a last resort. 

Hi Daniel,

I'm guessing that you would have tried this, but could you set the encoding to ISO-8859-1 ( Reason being: I read somewhere that this is also called Latin -1, and it is similiar to Windows -1252, but there are some differences)

Let me know how it goes.

Regards

Varghese

Some additional info which I found, this is with regard to characters in ISO-8859-1

https://marketing.adobe.com/resources/help/en_US/whitepapers/multibyte/multibyte_iso8859-1.html 

If you scroll down, you can see this encoding covers the special characters you were talking about

Thank you Varghese George for your response. I had to wait a bit in order not to interfere with some other activities before I could test it. Unfortunately this character encoding setting doesn't help me either. I think I will log a support ticket with Apptio support to investigate. 

Daniel, can you let us know what support comes back with as we're having the same issue and can't seem to find a suitable solution for these?

Hi Daniel,

Were you able to resolve this issue ? I'm interested to know the root cause of this issue. There could be learnings from this, especially when we are importing data from different systems.

Varghese

hi Varghese George, I logged a ticket with Apptio support and they are investigating. I will share my experiences and the troubleshoot here once I received feedback and hopefully resolved the issue.

Hi @Daniel Aanstoot, hi Varghese George,

did Apptio solve the issue in the meantime?

Best regards, Fabian

Hello @Fabian Woldsen

I'm also waiting to hear back from Daniel . Would love to hear if and how Apptio has resolved this.

Regards

Varghese

hi Varghese George, @Fabian Woldsen, the ticket has been open with Apptio for a long time, but they were not able to solve this. A manual export (from Service Now) and import in Apptio works, with the correct character encoding, but an automated one using DataLink doesn't work. 

I agreed with Apptio that there was no need to solve this issue as an incident, but I expected them to solve the bug. I am unaware of the current status of that work.