[Observium] apache application error after upgrade

After some efforts I got the apache application plugin for observium working for a certain server. I was at first stuck with a missing module of PERL(LWP::Simple)

It was working fine till today when i upgraded apache from 2.2.19 to 2.2.23. Not a very big upgrade, but now the apache script of observium is not working anymore. If I execute it manually it produces the following error:

[root@server01 agent-local]# perl apache Data fetch failure.

Any suggestions what might be causing this or where to look for an answer or more detailed error message and how to solve it?

Many thanks,