Depending on exactly what you want to achieve, a mosquitto borker might help. You might like to look at http://www.mqtt-dashboard.com/ - a cloud based mosquitto broker.
There's an android app MQTT Dash (and others), that you could use to monitor your 'alive' pings and other data. I'm sure IOS have similar MQTT apps.
There are a number of MQTT libraries you can install from the IDE with examples.
Or maybe see my comments in this post Home Monitoring similar to ThingerIO - Home Automation - Arduino Forum