Ansible can be used to harden the operating system once the VM is running. It is an automation tool that can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates.
Ansible and other configuration management tools are part of the cloud management strategies discussed in the CompTIA Cloud+ certification material.

To collect process-level, memory-usage tracking for virtual machines, deploying cloud-monitoring agent software is the best approach. The agent can gather detailed system metrics and send them to the cloud-native monitoring services for analysis and visualization. References: CompTIA Cloud+ Study Guide (Exam CV0-
004) - Chapter on Cloud Monitoring