Oracle Database Discussions

Hello guys, I am a bit confused here on how to find out the active oracle sessions.
usually to find the active oracle sessions for a particular user, i use the following query.
select from v$session where status='ACTIVE' and username='<username>'*

when I used the above query I got zero results, but when I look at the TOAD session browser, I see one active session for the the user I am querying. The user uses the Informatica to send the query to the database to be executed.

My question is how do i really make sure if the user's session is actually active or not.

Thanks