Design and Validation of an Agentless Web Application for IT Infrastructure Operations Management

Abstract

The manual management of information technology (IT) infrastructure operations at an IT services company in Lima, Peru, was characterized by fragmented procedures, delays, and limited traceability, which hindered service continuity and compromised information security. This study presents the design, development, and validation of an on-premises web application for the centralized management of IT infrastructure operations, evaluated across three dimensions: operational efficiency, execution effectiveness, and security with auditing. Built on a layered architecture, the solution employs Ansible as an automation engine that executes specific tasks on Linux, Windows, and VMware servers for diverse operations, without installing agents on the managed hosts. Access control is performed against Active Directory using roles that separate operations from administration. A pre-test/post-test quasi-experimental design compared the consolidated version of the application with its pilot version in a controlled test environment replicating the corporate infrastructure. The time reduction index increased by 41 percentage points, the operation success rate rose by 24 points, and the traceability level improved by 39 points, with Wilcoxon signed-rank tests confirming significance and large Cohen's effect sizes. The results confirm the viability of the solution and provide replicable evidence for the modernization of enterprise IT operations.