These fields aren't linked. In most cases (outside of a source like cloud) the operational status is a manual field that needs to be managed via a process. If the most recent discovery time is iterating then this is a good indication that something went wrong in that process and it makes for a great follow-up indicator for that CI to be investigated. You could actually set a business rule to reset the status to something else if it's retired and most recent discovery iterates but that isn't out of the box.