swap – how is it allocated and historically tracked

newbie question here…

looks like my system isn’t using swap…

root@testvm:~# free -m
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:            985         667          72           3         245         176
Swap:             0           0           0

a few questions

1. do i have to enable swap? I realize it’s not a good thing and you want to avoid it, but i dont know if it’s something you have to turn on or if the OS creates it as needed? the fact that my server just shows "0" for everything kind of confuses me.
2. is there a way to see if swap was ever used? i believe the "free -m" command shows current usage. but say for instance somethnig happens overnight that causes swap usage but the situation goes away and the swap is cleared out. is there a way that i could see it was used? (time/amount/etc would be great but i’ll settle for anything at this point).

thanks!