UTF8

An issue that I’ve now run into a few times now so I thought it was worth a blog post – if you are using the REST Custom sensor within PRTG Network Monitor you may see the error below if you have generated your REST configuration using PowerShell.
XML: The returned XML does not match the expected schema. (code: PE233) — JSON: The returned JSON does not match the expected structure (Invalid JSON.). (code: PE231)
The cause is the default encoding from PowerShell is UCS-2 LE BOM as shown in Notepad++ below.
The fix is simple in that when generating your REST configuration append -Encoding utf8 at the end of the Out-File command. I’ve also seen this apply to a few other situations when using PowerShell to output some form of text – in particular feeds for Palo Alto Networks Next Generation Firewalls.