You could try seeing if anyone is listening on the syslog port. The beauty of this approach is that it doesn't matter if you're logging on localhost or a remote host.

#! /usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use IO::Socket;

sub syslog_ok {
    my $s = IO::Socket::INET->new(
        Timeout  => 5,
        Proto    => 'udp',
        PeerHost => '10.0.0.1',
        PeerPort => 514,
    );
    if( $s ) {
        close $s;
        1;
    }
    else {
        0;
    }
}

print syslog_ok(), "\n";
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