I found many of the Q&A on this topic, not nothing was helping me - that's because my issue was more basic ( what can I say I am not a networking guru :) ). My ip address in /etc/hosts was incorrect. What I had tried included the following for CATALINA_OPTS:
CATALINA_OPTS="$CATALINA_OPTS -Djava.awt.headless=true -Xmx128M -server
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=7091
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false
-Djava.rmi.server.hostname=A.B.C.D" #howeverI put the wrong ip here!
export CATALINA_OPTS
My problem was that I had changed my ip address many months ago, but never updated my /etc/hosts file. it seems that by default the jconsole uses the hostname -i ip address in some fashion even though I was viewing local processes. The best solution was to simply change the /etc/hosts file.
The other solution which can work is to get your correct ip address from /sbin/ifconfig and use that ip address when specifying the ip address in, for example, a catalina.sh script:
-Djava.rmi.server.hostname=A.B.C.D