Grant Fritchey shows a lightweight way of capturing plan metrics:
I place a lot of emphasis on capturing actual execution plans because of the runtime metrics, but with Trace Flag 7412, we don’t need the plan. This is great news, because capturing execution plans, even using extended events, is an expensive proposition. However, using either the query_thread_profile event, or, Trace Flag 7412, we can get the runtime metrics without the plan.
Very interesting. But as Grant points out, this is not a cost-free operation, so use as needed but not willy-nilly.