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[Quality][Medium] Make health diagnostics reflect degraded protocol dependencies #2411

Description

@Baskarayelu

Objective

Return structured health status with explicit degraded reasons and no mutating side effects.

Why this matters

A binary healthy/unhealthy signal can report success while pause state, configuration, or invariant checks indicate that user operations are unsafe.

This is a substantive production-quality improvement. It must change runtime behavior, security guarantees, correctness, reliability, or meaningful user functionality. It is not a documentation-only, formatting-only, or trivial dependency task.

Scope

Area: health and operational diagnostics

Starting points: src/health.rs, src/invariants.rs, src/pause.rs, src/observability.md

The contributor should verify the current implementation before changing it and keep the PR limited to this issue. Do not introduce unrelated refactors or weaken existing CI/security gates.

Acceptance criteria

  • Health output distinguishes healthy, paused, degraded, and invariant-failed states.
  • Diagnostics do not expose secrets or permit state changes.
  • Each degraded reason is deterministic and actionable for operators.
  • Health checks remain bounded and cannot scan unbounded storage.

Required validation

  • Test each state and combinations of pause/configuration/invariant conditions.

  • Test corrupted or unavailable diagnostic data fails closed.

  • Add a budget regression for the health path.

  • The PR explains the failure mode, the chosen design, backward-compatibility impact, and rollback or migration considerations.

  • The PR includes CI evidence and does not contain secrets, generated noise, unrelated cleanup, or disabled checks.

Contributor deliverables

  • Open a focused feature branch and do not begin implementation until assigned.
  • Reference this issue with Closes #<issue-number> or Fixes #<issue-number>.
  • Check off every acceptance criterion in the PR with links to the relevant code and tests.
  • Include a security/correctness note explaining why adversarial inputs cannot bypass the new guarantee.

Maintainer quality bar

The PR must be independently reviewable, preserve existing behavior outside this scope, exercise failure paths, and pass the repository's complete required CI/CD checks. Reward eligibility is not guaranteed by this issue or by merging.

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