Actually, traceroute doesn't "return a lot", it returns 0 for success, and 1 for failure, like many programs. It does "output a lot", but that's easy to fix. See if this works for you:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

# IP adress or hostname of the remote machine to test
my $remote = "192.168.0.2";
if(system("traceroute $remote 1> /dev/null 2>&1"))
{
    print "$remote is down\n";
}
else
{
    print "$remote is up\n";
}
__END__
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