With further research, I encountered a very useful blog here and a follow entry here which gave me a better idea of how it all works. Answers to questions that hadn't even arose yet were all answered a thorough walkthrough was provided.
To start things off, JMX is a technolgy that allows users and developers to manage their Java applications and services. To start the JMX agent, arguments in the format of -Dpropertyname=value are placed after the java command (java -Dpropertyname=value ./javaapp).
For my monitoring environment, the arguments I specifically need are:
- -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote (since I am running remote monitoring)
- -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=portnum (where portnum is neither the port number of my jstatd connection nor jmeter-server)
- -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false (allows me to connect without needing my ssl configurations)
- -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false (allows me to connect without a password file)
And voila! The connection is made and I can successfully monitor my applications and the attributes :).