Comment 23 for bug 1786910

To add to my last comment, you can download the monit sourcecode here:
https://mmonit.com/monit/dist/monit-5.25.2.tar.gz

You can specify the non-default destination for the monitrc config file with this:
./configure --sysconfdir /etc/monit
./make

Then you can make this into a .deb file with:
checkinstall

Then you just `apt-get remove monit` to remove the bad monit installation and `dpkg -i monit_5.25.2-1_amd64.deb` to install the one you just built.

So this version of monit will accept commands like `monit unmonitor all`, etc. However, running `systemctl restart monit` will not start the daemon.