My Linode had a load spike. It was cited by someone much more popular.

My question is "How can I look at my logs, and figure out how well it held up (or not)?"

I have a plain WordPress setup. I considered putting in some caching plugins, but figured I'd wait until it's needed.

after the fact might be tedious... I like Munin which if properly configured (and it is REALLY easy to configure), can give you lots of insight for future....

http://library.linode.com/server-monitoring/munin