Hi,
You could check out LWP::UserAgent and LWP::Simple.
If you want to extend into monitoring and health checks look at WWW::Mechanize.

use WWW::Mechanize;
    my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
    $mech->get( $url );
[download]

Just get the page and check for a 200 status (the documentation on these modules is self explanatory)
If you dont want to go with a perl module and want a simple command line solution check WGET.
 wget -q --proxy=off --cache=off $URL -O /tmp/urlget.html
HTH
Regards,
Rajdeep.
Abigail is right,content checking for a string you are expecting is a good idea