Technically, you can use the same places in the code where you stop/start/fork traces to also be the places where you increment the counters/gauges, etc. Which I think the GP was alluding to when describing the micrometer solution. Similarly, you can derive metrics for log lines without having to emit the actual log lines.

Then separately you can have log levels or verbosity levels that control to which level you actually emit traces/logs and/or roll up metrics.