Vitality assurance in microservice architectures: introducing the health box testing methodology

IntroductionMicroservice architectures introduce complex testing challenges, particularly for grey failures — partial degradation scenarios in which infrastructure signals appear normal while user-facing journeys fail silently. Existing monitoring approaches lack the sensitivity to surface such failures early.MethodsWe introduce Health Box Testing (HBT), a runtime vitality assurance methodology that deploys synthetic Health Agents to execute representative user journeys against production-like e