http://blog.vmsplice.net/2011/03/how-to-access-qemu-monitor-through.html
It is sometimes useful to issue QEMU monitor commands to VMs managed by libvirt. Since libvirt takes control of the monitor socket it is not possible to interact with the QEMU monitor in the same way as when running QEMU or KVM manually.
Daniel Berrange shared the following techniques on IRC a while back. It is actually pretty easy to get at the QEMU monitor even while libvirt is managing the VM:
virsh qemu-monitor-command --hmp <domain> '<command> [...]'
sudo service libvirt-bin stop # or "libvirtd" on Red Hat-based distros sudo nc -U /var/lib/libvirt/qemu/<domain>.monitor ... sudo service libvirt-bin start