I had one of my EC2 instances (Ubuntu 14.04) lock up on Monday morning. I use it to run a Ruby on Rails app and to do a handful of ETL jobs. The website wasn't able to load and I wasn't able to SSH into the box. So, I went into the AWS console and rebooted the instance. This has happened 3 times in the last 6 months. It looks like the CPU spikes up to almost 100% around the same time when the instance locks up.

I'd love to be able to identify the root cause of the instance locking up. It seems like this article is more about the commands you'd run to assess the health of an active/working EC2 instance and not one that you're unable to SSH into. Any idea on how to identify the problem with my EC2 instance?