The correct answer is Operational simulation testing.

Operational simulation testing involves exercising a live production system with realistic traffic patterns or injected faults so that you can observe behavior under true operational conditions. This type of testing can replay real workloads, run synthetic transactions, or perform controlled fault injection to surface configuration mistakes and data corruption that only appear when the full software and data paths are exercised in production.

Cloud Monitoring is not the best choice because it focuses on collecting metrics, logs, and alerts and it does not actively simulate real user traffic or inject faults to reveal hidden configuration errors or corrupted data. Monitoring helps detect symptoms but it does not by itself reproduce the conditions that uncover root causes.

Configuration validation testing is typically performed prior to deployment and it validates declared settings and templates rather than exercising a running system with realistic load and fault scenarios. That testing can catch misconfigurations earlier but it will not always reveal issues that only show up under production runtime conditions.

Security scanning is aimed at finding vulnerabilities and insecure configurations from a security standpoint and it does not generally look for runtime data corruption or the subtle operational misconfigurations that only surface when the application is exercised in production. Security scans are complementary but they do not replace operational simulation.

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