I know I’ve said some bad things about the tool in some past posts but I’ll give credit where credit is due – the global shell in Opsware is amazing – especially when you’re dealing with Windows hosts. To be able to quickly write bash scripts to go across all my Windows hosts to get registry keys is pure win.
I’ve also got to say – the further I dig into the tool, the more I enjoy how much you can customize with it. True – it’s not always the easiest thing to do and the interface leaves *alot* to be desired ( the Custom Script section in A&R is on top of my list right now.. ) but they do provide tools for you to do alot of what you can’t do with the interface.
For instance, there is a python API that you can install on your hosts that lets you pull down certain data – things like custom attributes. This is a big win because it means you can write a single script for checking something out and have it pull in some of those custom attributes. Maybe they’ll deploy a newer version of python with it next time – 1.5.2 is pretty old. ( hint, hint )
Don’t get me wrong – things aren’t all peachy yet – the custom scripts section still needs alot of work ( fixed width font, tab widths, ability to link or import scripts from the library, passing arguments to the remediation script, etc ) but as I go deeper into the tool, I also see that things aren’t quite as bad as I thought. I’m still not sold on some of the philosophy behind how they do things like managing certain resources as whole resources with methods, rather than as individual bits of config files that you have to manage separately but with some of the stuff I’ve been getting into, things seem to be getting better and will make the tool a bit easier to use.
Hopefully I’ll have more to say in the near future but I don’t want to ruin anything. 
Grok PowerShell ?