Hope I'm in the right place, if not, please advise.

Running asl stretch on an ESXI host, debian 9 VM. Finally got allmon2 to login to the node however, I can't seem to resolve the "Could not connect to Asterisk Manager." error. using Allmon2. The node show registered. I can however, telnet in on port 5038 and authenticate just fine.

Also, can't get asterisk to acknowledge any commands in asterisk -cli. I do get DTMF decoding, audio to and from the radio along with ptt but even using rpt fun cannot get anything to happen when I issue a command ( rpt fun mynode *3othernode) etc.

Any ideas?

Likely just a username/password issue or a misconfiguration in allmon.ini.php. Make sure:

host= 
is set to 
host=127.0.0.1:5038

Verify user= and passwd= match the settings in /etc/asterisk/manager.conf
A correct configuration should look like this: