Diag Collection Failed on Windows.

Applicability

Splunk Enterprise

Description

When trying to collect a diag from Splunk on Windows to send to support, the following python error might be reported on the command line :

15/May/2020:12:16:25: ERROR Exception occurred during: Tasklist, windows process lister
15/May/2020:12:16:25: ERROR Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Splunk\Python-3.7\lib\site-packages\splunk\clilib\info_gather.py", line 2626, in 
inthread_runner
    self.stdout = self.stdout.decode()
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 534: invalid start byte15/May/2020:12:16:25: WARNING Tasklist returned failure, exit code -1; diag may lack running 
splunkd.exe information.
.
.
15/May/2020:12:16:25: INFO Diag failure, writing out logged messages to 
'C:\Users\splunk\AppData\Local\Temp\diag-fail-4szfi2bh.txt', please send output + this file 
to either an existing or new case ; http://www.splunk.com/support

 

Resolution

This issue is caused by Splunk running in the Norwegian locale on the Windows OS. After switching to en_US utf8 locale the diag collection will complete successfully.

This issue can also occur if directory names and filenames contain characters with non-utf8 supported characters under the Splunk configuration install location.

 

Revision History

Revision	Publish Date	Comments
1.0	29-Sep-2026	Initial Release