It's not that hard for VMI and harder than you think for network.
I did work for a public cloud and we did think of VMI for diagnostics and malware checks. Once deployed and automated, it would be trivial to reuse for other purposes. I don't expect public cloud to use that daily, but I'd be surprised if they didn't have the process ready.
On the other hand, you want to process the LB traffic as fast as you can and any monitoring/reporting delay would have bad effects. Reconfiguring the filters / sinks at runtime takes effort too.
With experience in both areas, I can tell you they're comparable overall. You have to go out of your way to do it, but it's not too far.