We are trying to integrate RACF from SailPoint . We successfully connected to RACF and communication is working in between connector gateway and mainframe agent. We are getting clean connector gateway logs confirming the connection is working fine but when I do Test Connection from RACF source in portal ,It returns back junk character with error message. I checked default IBM-1047 encoding in being used end to end. Did Anyone got this issue while integrating with RACF.
Yes, this is a known issue that can occur during RACF integration with SailPoint IdentityNow (IDN), particularly around character encoding and Test Connection behavior.
Root Cause
The junk characters typically appear due to character encoding mismatches between the SailPoint UI (web layer), Connector Gateway (Java), and Mainframe (EBCDIC/ASCII). Even if IBM-1047 is set correctly, there can still be mismatches in:
- Java Virtual Machine encoding defaults
- Terminal or locale settings on the mainframe
- Incorrect or double encoding in the agent scripts
- Or the RACF response includes non-UTF-8 compliant messages which the SailPoint UI cannot parse
The “Test Connection” feature in SailPoint is a higher-level handshake that expects clean, UTF-8-compatible output. If the agent or RACF returns special characters (e.g., mainframe banners or error messages in EBCDIC), they are not properly parsed in the UI.
Others in the SailPoint Community have experienced similar behavior, especially during first-time RACF onboarding. The key takeaway is that Test Connection is not always reliable for mainframe sources due to encoding complexity, even when the actual provisioning and aggregation work fine.