[libvirt] connecting to qemu domain monitor socket outside of libvirt/virsh

Hi, So I see that when i have a qemu vm running, that i created via libvirt, there is a socket here: /var/lib/libvirt/qemu/domain-<name>/monitor.sock I am trying to connect to this socket via cli or a completely separate C/C++ application to be able to control the VM, but I can't seem to get it to work. Does anyone know if/how this is possible? I've tried 'nc', 'socat', and based on the qemu libvirt code, 'socket'/'connect', but nothing seems to work. Also, is it possible through libvirt, when creating a qemu VM, one can specify to enable the QMP socket? Thanks in advance, Jason