Unwanted process omgz

Not sure if this is the appropriate forum for this, seemed as good as any.

So my vps went down last night and when I contacted the host they said I had an unwanted process running that took up too much load. So clearly I have no idea to figure out what happened. Is there any log somewhere that I can check out to try to pinpoint what exactly happened? Also, is there anything I can set up to alert me to something that's taking up a ton of load on the system?

The vps is back up and I don't see any processes that look out of the ordinary, and nothing is using crazy cpu cycles. I did notice that I was running nginx 1.7.1, I'm about to update that to 1.7.2. I'm running 1.2.3-eva2000.06 which was most recently downloaded on June 6th.

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I also noticed that I'm running Sendmail. Since I'm using godaddy for my email can I assume that it's safe (and smart?) to turn sendmail off entirey using yum remove sendmail?

 

Thanks a bunch for the reply. I can't believe I missed that entry in the FAQ for where the logs are. I'm at a loss for what could have caused whatever happened. I went through the logs and nothing sticks out as being responsible. AVG scan of the entire system was clean, wordfence security scan was clean as well.

I ran the nginx update from 1.7.1 to 1.7.2, which btw works flawlessly. You're software is amazing, especially for novices like myself.

I've been monitoring the processes using the top command for most of the day and nothing is going crazy cpu wise. Occasionally php-fpm spikes to 50+ for one second when a visitor hits the site, but that's it.

These are my stats from top at the moment, everything appears to be functioning correctly.

load average: 0.00, 0.05, 0.06
Tasks: 38 total, 1 running, 37 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 3.6%us, 0.2%sy, 0.0%ni, 96.2%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 1048576k total, 225556k used, 823020k free, 0k buffers
Swap: 1310720k total, 56756k used, 1253964k free, 84288k cached