We got similar issue and I'd like to share how we were troubleshooting this. Hope it could be helpful for somebody. The root cause in our case was pretty trivial, we used password in local language. Those characters were unreadable by Python. Below you can find steps that helped us to understand the problem: 1. Add logging to activity.py file # add "print v.encode('utf-8')" to line 386 of /var/lib/ambari-agent/cache/stacks/HDP/2.1/services/SMARTSENSE/package/scripts/activity.py file<br> 2. Remove corresponding pyc file to let Python catch up the changes sudo rm /var/lib/ambari-agent/cache/stacks/HDP/2.1/services/SMARTSENSE/package/scripts/activity.pyc 3. Retry installation process, in logs you should see the string which causes the problem 4. Rollback custom changes in the script and remove pyc file ... View more