There are DMVs that expose Always On metadata and status information. If you aren't familiar with them and can't find a blog post just set up Profiler and open the SSMS monitoring GUI. Great way to see what the GUIs do!

As for email, Database Mail allows you to send mail using TSQL. Set up a SQL Agent job to run every so often and email if AG is too far behind. May be able to do an Alert for this too, come to think of it.