GENERATING A SERVICE COST MODEL USING DISCOVERED ATTRIBUTES OF PROVISIONED VIRTUAL MACHINES

A service cost model for services offered in a cloud-computing environment is generated by discovering cost-related attributes in a service catalog of provisioned virtual machines and applications provisioned thereon. The set of cost-related attributes includes at least one of the following: outage frequency, time to repair, cost of repair information, and time claimed by each resource type to fix past outages. The generated service cost model is tracked and adjusted against actuals periodically to reflect the true cost of offered services. Further by federating with other cloud service providers, the costs of a same service are compared between the different providers, and accordingly a recommendation for a provider based on the costs is proposed.