Ipad 3 Suddenly Using Data Plan Uncontrollably / Exhausting Data Plan

I have an iPad 3 (64 GB) for a year, and previously an iPad 2, both with AT&T data plans. Never before have I had the following happen, after a couple of years using a 1-3 GB data plan. And I've never had ANY problem with my data plans before or unusual usage. (My iPads have been trouble free too.)
I used my iPad late Saturday night and went to bed. Normally I close all apps, but not always. My 64GB iPad is nearly full and I just got a warning from Apple about my iCloud storage being almost full.
When I woke up Sunday AM, all my data (about 2/3rds of 3 GB) had been used up.  When I called AT&T, that confirmed that my dataplan had run continuously from about my time of going to bed up until the morning when it ran out of data, about 10 hours total.  They couldn't give me more details than that.  The person I spoke to didn't seem very knowledgable about iPads but we did discuss that possibly an app ran in the background or an advertisement on a webpage, and this 'ate' my data uncontrollably. 
At&T gave me 250 MB of data complimentary to help me troubleshoot the problem. I made sure everything was closed, everything was backed up, synced, etc. (as I normally would,) then I rebooted my iPad.  I made sure my data monitoring programs (which had previously been uninstalled since I never used them, but I reinstalled DataUsage,) and IMMEDIATELY my data started being sucked up. I was a third through 250 MB in maybe 2 minutes.  I was also watching the "Usage"  in my iPad's "General - Usage - Cellular Usage" area and as I kept rezero-ing it, it just kept jumping up to 1000 KB, most of it as 'sent', in jumps of about 200 KB every couple of seconds before I would reset, over and over.
I finally turned off cellular data and here I am.
Does anyone have a 'roadmap' to specifically troubleshoot this? I am not sure when/what last apps were updated. (Is there a way to pull this info up?)
ANY help will be so much appreciated.  I am having some trouble finding information on how to troubleshoot this.
I so also have an iPhone5, and nothing unusual going on there from what I can tell (I had them review my data usage there, and all seems 'normal'. Same for cellular, calls, texts, etc.)
Should I just go to an apple store?

When I am home, I am celluar only at this point. I was not connected to wifi at the location where the cellular data was used to exhaustion. So being on cellular and leaving it on overnight is something I've done for almost 2 years and never had a problem like this.
Is there a way to troubleshoot what apps might have been using that data, specifically? Or whether it was repeatedly checking email (which would be a new problem, since all my email previously has been normal and fine previously and I haven't changed any aspect of that for ...probably a year.
Is there a new glitch out there that might have caused this? That's more what I'm curious about. Or a way to methodically go back and see what specifically was using that data. Can I do that? Is there something out there that will tell me what it was?
Thanks so much Tom! That is a great answer under different circumstances

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