If you only care about whether a given string exists in a logfile, and send a mail if so then you might find a shell script to be sufficient?

#!/bin/sh

if ( grep "pattern" /var/log/log.file 2>/dev/null >/dev/null ); then
  hostname | mail -s "Backup failed" some.email@example.com
fi
[download]

Of course if you want to learn perl, or if your requirements change, then you could come back to it..