A manager of a cross-cloud distributed application manages the application via a cloud-management service. The application is hosted collectively by plural clouds, at least one of which is a public cloud. The service is provided with log-in credentials for the public cloud so that the resources provided by the public cloud to the application can be discovered. The service collects data generate by the clouds, translates the collected data to conform to a unified data model used by the service. The translated data can be aggregated, e.g. over any group of application instances, e.g., to characterize the distributed application as a whole, any component of the distributed application, or any arbitrary collection of application instances. A cost analysis can determine the cost effectiveness of any potential reconfiguration of the distributed application. The distributed application is reconfigured based, at least in part, on the cost analysis.