A productivity tool for an analytical laboratory is presented. The productivity tool provides aggregated operational status of all laboratory instruments within an analytical laboratory, even without access to their respective internal data stream (i.e., legacy and third party instruments) by determining operational status of a first group of instruments by capturing and processing internal data streams comprising data indicative of an operational status. The productivity tool also determines operational status of a second group of instruments by capturing and processing external surveillance stream(s) of one or more laboratory instrument(s) of the second group.